When you’re making a local backup to an external hard drive, you may find you want more control. As neither has major flaws and are both free, there isn’t much risk to trying them out. The two quickest and easiest solutions on a Mac are to use Time Machine for your local backup and iCloud as an online backup. There are four main ways to backup your Mac and keep your data safe from disaster. For a more well-rounded solution, you should follow the 3-2-1 rule and use a combination of the two. Although the cloud is far more reliable, its cost and slow transfers mean it’s far from a silver bullet. Hard drives are cheap and fast, but lack reliability for long term storage. You’ll also need to decide if you want to use local storage, cloud backups or both. If you do, you should find a solution that can protect all of your devices on a single subscription.
In this article, we’ll go through how you can use these different methods to backup your Mac.īefore you start to look for a backup provider for your Mac, you should also consider if you need to backup any Windows machines. However, actually using these programs to protect your data can get tricky.
When it comes to creating backups, macOS gives you plenty of options, and both the preinstalled software as well as third-party providers offer good solutions.
If you’re not comfortable using Terminal, instead set each of your browsers, in their Preferences, to use your new Downloads folder instead of the one in your Home folder.
ICloud Drive Desktop and Documents (which I’ll just call iCDD) takes care of that for them. Dropbox is probably more reliable and flexible, but it requires that you have a workflow of saving stuff into your Dropbox folder, and some Mac users just don’t want to do that they want to put stuff in the Desktop and Documents folders that come on the computer, and call it a day. ICloud Drive Desktop and Documents sync has been a game changer in terms of Mac users having the same stuff on all computers.