I have not used Time Machine before, but now need to back up to my external hard drive.  How do I do this?

Need to back up hard drive due to needed replacement.  Time machine is available to back up to external hard drive.  Not clear how to do this and then to restore once the hard drive is replaced.

I would not use Time Machine for this task. Rather I suggest you clone to the external drive. You can then boot from the external drive to restore your clone. First, purchase Carbon Copy Cloner.
Clone using Carbon Copy Cloner
  1. Open Carbon Copy Cloner.
  2. Select the Source volume from the left side dropdown menu.
  3. Select the Destination volume from the right side dropdown menu.
  4. Click on the Clone button.
  5. When completed select Disk Center from the Window menu.
  6. Click on the Recovery HD tab then select the backup drive from the list.
  7. Click on the button labeled "Create a Recovery partition for this volume."
Destination means the external backup drive. Source means the internal startup drive.
You now have a fully bootable copy of your iMac's hard drive. When you receive your iMac back after the drive replacement you can boot it from this backup and use Carbon Copy Cloner to restore the backup from the external drive to the internal drive. The process is identical except you will switch the Source and Destination volumes - Source will be the external drive; Destination will be the internal drive.
Because the newly installed drive will most likely have OS X installed you can skip Steps 5-7. You can now continue to use your external backup drive by setting up scheduled backups with CCC. No need to use Time Machine.

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    12/22/14 3:20:30.670 PM bird[263]: Assertion failed: ![_xpcClients containsObject:client]
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  • Can I recover lost files when not using Time Machine?

    Hi,
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    Willi Sletten

    You would have to buy a file recovery utility, and hope that the file's location on the hard drive had not been written over yet. If it has been written over, it's gone for good. If you plan on doing this, you need to shut your machine down now and don't turn it on again until you've got the file recovery utility in-hand.
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  • I have an older macbook pro and the hard drive is starting to go (making loud noises). i tried to back up to an external hard drive (my passport essential se) using time machine and the computer keeps shutting down. suggestions to complete backup please?

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    Sounds like you'll need to access that drive while it is not booted. You need to replace it anyway, so do that, then one way or another (ext enclusure, et), access it and copy files.
    If you keep trying to boot it, you might kill it for good and not get your files, so just swap it out first.

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