How do I boot up my laptop from an external backup drive, or how do I verify that a backup is good? I want to upgrade my Mac to at least OS 10.9. It's running 10.6.8 now and has an Intel Core i5 processor. I've been making backups to an external drive via Time Machine, and I read that one step before upgrading is making sure my backups are good. One way to check is to boot up my laptop from the backup drive. But I was recently told that my current OS doesn't support booting up from my external drive, which I confirmed (the drive doesn't show on the screen while I have Option pressed during startup). What are my options for making sure the backups are good?
Head over to System Preferences &lt; Time Machine and then select the "Show Time Machine in menu bar checkbox". From the menu bar, select time machine and select "Enter Time Machine". Now make sure your latest backup is visible there and you can see your files, this will ensure you have performed your backup correctly. To be safe, navigate to the disc and make sure you can see all files there.