How to back up your Mac

You absolutely have to back up your Mac. If you don’t, one day you will lose something important and irreplaceable and there will be nothing you can do about it. According to iMore, here are ways to back up your files.

Why do you need to back up?

One copy of your data is no copies at all. That is because hard drives and solid state drives fail. They fail all the time. Two copies of your data is basically one copy, since there is a chance both could fail at the same time.

To make sure your data is safe; you may want to back it up in a way that minimises the chance you could ever lose it. Realistically, that means a local back up as well as an off-site or online backup.

What is a local back up and how do you do it?

A local back up is literally taking the files on your Mac and copying them to another drive in your home or office. Both copies are in the same place, so you can easily get to the back up when and if you need it, and either keep it up-to-date or restore from it if something bad happens to the original.

There are a couple of ways to do a local backup. The first and easiest is with Apple’s built-in Time Machine.

What is Time Machine and how do I use it?

Time Machine is the easiest way to get started with local back up. Because it is built right into macOS, there is no additional software to buy; you just need an external drive to get started. Time Machine is even supported by popular mass-storage devices, so it can scale as much as you need.

If you are really brand new to backups and want the simplest, most set-it-and-forget-it solution possible, you can get an Apple AirPort Time Capsule router. It is literally a Wi-Fi router with a hard drive built in.

Fair warning, the Wi-Fi router part is current-generation fast, but has not been updated in years and does not use modern networking technologies like mesh. Still, if you are not into or interested in the technology, get a Time Capsule, plug it in, hit start, and you will be halfway there.

Cloning for local back up

The big advantage to cloning is that it makes a bit-for-bit copy of your drive which means that, if anything happens to your Mac, you can actually boot from the clone and get right back to work if you need to, before worrying about fixing your main drive or restoring any data.

I use SuperDuper! for this and rotate between two different backup drives. That way, I minimise the chance of losing anything should one of those drives fail. Carbon Copy Cloner will get the same job done, so you have options.

Online or cloud backup

We live in the age of the internet and, while local and offsite backups are a good enough solution to recommend them, there are considerable advantages to going to the cloud.

Similar to Time Machine and Time Capsule, online backup works by paying for a subscription, downloading a utility and starting it up. It then churns away in the background, copying your data to giant server farms and updating it as and when needed.

There is typically also an option to send or receive hard drives, if you have a large amount of data, to get you started or in the event you need to recover.

BackBlaze and Carbonite are solid services that have been around for years.

If BackBlaze or Carbonite are like disk cloning in the cloud, iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, and the other storage providers are like copying a few important files over. They are incredibly handy to keep things in sync and to restore a few files here and there if and when you need to, but if you lose your entire Mac, unless you have stored a disk image, you won’t be able to simply restore and go back about your business.

That said, most of them have free and cheap plans and are well worth using in addition to an online backup service because you can quickly and easily sync and recover files.

iCloud automatically syncs and backups basic Mac files and let you access them on iOS. Dropbox is where you can store your Mac document folders. Google Drive can also be used for documents.

Pick a date. Set a calendar reminder. Every time it goes off, check your backups and improve your strategy as needed. Even though backups always feel like tomorrow’s problem, losing your data can profoundly screw up your today. And odds are it will happen at some point, so be ready.

Copyright PUNCH.


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