Embarrassingly, shortly after posting last week’s edition, I was reconfiguring my local backup system and inadvertently cleared out 50GB of archived audio and video content I’d saved over the years. Ouch!

I went to sleep last Tuesday feeling the effects of this grief moment and thinking that in this new year, I was also entering a new era of personal computing without any way to retrieve the lost media.

Wednesday morning, I was lying in bed and suddenly remembered that in my $50/year Backblaze online backup, I’d included the drive containing the archive. I raced to the Backblaze website and restored everything I’d deleted. Crisis averted; consolidation and grief pushed off to another day!

This is a refresh of my September 10, 2018 post, Backing Up. Follow these simple steps to ensure you always have at least two copies of everything, preferably three or more.

Start Local

One or more local backups ensures you’re protected against theft, crash, and various other hazards, as long as you follow some basic logic. Assuming the first copy of all your data is on your Mac, the second copy can be on a drive you connect externally to your Mac.

Use a tool like Time Machine, built into every version of macOS since 2007, to have a full computer backup that archives files as you delete or make changes to them over time.

However, don’t intentionally delete files on your Mac after you’ve backed them up. Your former backup becomes the sole copy of those items, defeating the purpose. If you’re trying to save space, contact me about how to make more room.

Alternatively or additionally, you can use a clone backup tool like SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner to create a bootable duplicate of your drive. Both of these tools can schedule periodic updates to the clone so you always have a recent copy you can start from and don’t miss a beat if your Mac walks off or dies.

I do both. Time Machine backs up my Mac twice a day in the archive fashion and SuperDuper! updates my clone once a week. You might know that Time Machine by default runs every hour as long as a backup drive is connected. You can use TimeMachineEditor to schedule it to run less frequently.

Go Global

Local backups are great for quick retrieval of lost files and recovery from some disasters, but they are not immune from bigger hits. How do you recover from flood, fire, earthquake, other disasters, and more extreme theft or destruction?

There are a few ways to implement remote backups so you don’t rely exclusively on media in the same location as your Mac. Check out David Pogue’s visit to the heart of “The Cloud” in Virginia for an idea of how private and secure these facilities are.

  1. Backblaze is a highly reviewed online backup solution that securely copies your data to a nearly secret location elsewhere in the land. For about $50 per year (first month free), you can backup unlimited data from one computer and any locally connected external drives. [Update: As of November 2023, Backblaze costs $99/year.]
  2. iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, and other cloud storage platforms do not back up your whole computer. They do, however, make it possible to save files from one device to a “cloud” location and make them available on other devices.
  3. A hybrid option is to get one or more extra external drives to use with a local backup tool and store them offsite. For example, periodically exchange the drive you have at home for the one stored at your friend’s home. Time Machine will happily alternate among multiple drives. It will also notify you when it’s been a while since the last backup to a specific drive.

3–2–1 Blastoff

Not sure when we’ll be backing up in space but this is a different space. Namely, how much space do you need?

  1. If you are using Time Machine to back up your internal drive and even some external drives, sum the total amount of data used among the drives and multiply by 1.5. This will give you a good estimate of the capacity you’ll want to have over the 3–7 years you’ll likely get out of a given drive. If you generate a lot of data and expect to fill your drive in that time, multiply its capacity instead.
  2. If you are using a clone backup tool, your destination should be at least the capacity of the drive you’re backing up.
  3. Some online backup providers set a quota for the amount of data you can store and can be pretty costly to upgrade. For the sake of ease, this is another reason I recommend Backblaze Personal Backup over other solutions.

Also, remember the rule of thumb for minimum backups: 3 copies, 2 local, 1 remote. So, a good starting point is one copy on your computer, one copy on a local external drive, and one copy somewhere else. For local backups, I now recommend Seagate drives. Contact me for more specific suggestions.

One last important note… To date, Time Machine requires its destination to be formatted HFS+ (Mac OS Extended–Journaled) and will not back up to APFS-formatted volumes. Meanwhile, in macOS Catalina, the destination of a clone backup tool must be formatted APFS. [Update: In macOS Big Sur and later, Time Machine backup drives are formatted APFS.]

This can get complicated, so I recommend a conversation with me if you’re considering a more advanced backup approach with multiple local backup types.

Having a reliable backup system is crucial to a sustainable computing experience. You never know when disaster might strike, even one fueled by human error.