You might as well follow the Mac data backup process below without Time Machine.
How to Backup Mac Files to External Hard Drive without Time Machine
You can check the box "Encrypt Backup Disk" and enter password to encrypt the portable hard drive. Step 1: Connect external hard drive to Mac via USB, FireWire, Thunderbolt or so, and a message will pop up, asking whether you want to use the drive to back up with Time Machine. You have to format your new external hard drive for Mac before backup. Follow Mac backup steps with Time Machine below.
It's one of the easiest way to save your Mac data to SSD or HDD, including mac apps, media files, DVD backup, documents and other.
Time Machine is a built-in tool on Mac, which works with internal and external disk drives to backup and restore data for macOS. How to Backup MacBook Air/Pro/iMac to External Hard Drive with Time Machine We also provide tips and fixes for Mac backup problems, Mac not recognizing external hard drive error and more for your reference. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to backup Mac to external hard drive (Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba etc.) with or without Time Machine, whether they are movies, videos, music, movies on DVDs, iTunes library, iTunes purchases/rentals, Mac apps, documents, or games. But if you’re using Time Machine to back up several computers over a network, you need to keep a few things in mind.If you haven't made any backup for your Mac, you'll regret when your most important data is lost or deleted accidentally. Once again, Time Machine is smart enough to keep one computer’s backups separate from another’s, even if it’s using the same disk. The other approach is to leave the drive connected to one of your Macs, share it using Personal File Sharing, and connect to it over the network (either a wired Ethernet network or a wireless AirPort network) that includes your other computers. However, it goes without saying that each computer can add files to its backup only with the drive attached to it. Moving a drive from one computer to another has the advantage of speed: backups will proceed much more quickly than they would over a network. You don’t have to turn off Time Machine, however it will patiently wait until you reconnect the drive is reconnected to before it runs again.
Before disconnecting a drive, click on the eject icon next to its name in the Finder sidebar.