Mac: Backup Best Practices
For the Home user it is great to review your backup strategy. Do you have one? Do you need one? And if so, what is the best way to backup the data that you have?
You will already have data stored on your Mac ~ in your Documents folder, on your Desktop, in Downloads etc. But if your internal drive crashed tomorrow would you still have a copy of your data?
Backing up to Time Machine
I always recommend that you setup Time Machine backups on your Mac to cover you in case of data loss. Time Machine is in-built to the MacOS and is already there on your system. It can be configured to run hourly, daily, weekly or manually.
It runs best with an external Hard Disk/SSD drive attached, so you will need to purchase one of these or use an existing one if you already have one. The backup disk should be at least double the size of the storage space size of your Mac. That is, if you have a Mac with 1TB of storage, your backup drive will need to be at least 2TBs or larger. The larger the drive, the more backups you can store.
The Time Machine backup will backup your entire Mac and you can use this to do a full system recovery if required. It will also backup all the individual files on your Mac, so you can also restore single files or folders if you need to.
Using Cloud Services
It can also be a great idea to store your data on the cloud. You can use services like iCloud, One Drive, Dropbox or Google Drive for example to do this.
Most of these services will also backup your Desktop and Documents folders and sync these folders directly to the cloud. This can also be useful if you have multiple devices and want your Desktop and Documents to be mirrored across each one.
Putting your data into a cloud service also means a copy is stored outside of your home, meaning if your laptop was destroyed as well as your Time Machine backup, you would still have another copy of your data to restore from.
Whilst the Cloud services mentioned are not considered backup services (They are file syncing services), I feel they offer a good level of basic backup protection for home users. For a more complete cloud backup solution we can also help you to setup and use iDrive or backups to a Synology NAS.
Time Machine & Cloud – A great starting point
Having a regular Time Machine backup and having your data successfully syncing to the cloud is a great starting point to protect your data. They can work together.
Personally at the moment I use Time Machine to backup around once a week and I store all of my data on Microsoft One Drive. I am using One Drive as I also pay a monthly subscription to use Microsoft Office and included in this is 1TB of One Drive cloud storage. This is something to consider if you are already paying for a Microsoft subscription.
This backup strategy suits me and the way I use my laptop.
We can support you to come up with the strategy that suits you best.
Do I need to use Cloud?
No you definitely don’t. You can also save all of your data locally on your Mac and use Time Machine to backup your local data. You could even make 2 backups and store one with a family member or friend if you wanted an offsite backup.
Please get in touch with us to assess your current backup strategy and to discuss what would work the best for you.
