Q: why back up a Mac
If everything I do on my Mac is on the Cloud, why would I need to back up on an external drive.
I am about to purchase one and wondered if it is necessary
OS X Mavericks (10.9.2)
Posted on Mar 29, 2016 7:53 PM
Each has its place. I don't use iCloud for backup as such of my Macs (but I do for iOS devices). What I DO use for syncing and backing up:
- iCloud sync for iWork documents that I want to share with mobile devices
- iCloud sync for Contacts, Calendar, Bookmarks
- Dropbox.com sync for files that I share between computers and with other members of my team and my clients
- Box.com sync for clients that use it
- Google Photos sync for all photos
- iCloud Photos for saving photos taken with my iPhone (which also automatically get uploaded to Google Photos)
- upthere.com syncing for photos, music and documents (because I'm a beta tester; otherwise it would be redundant)
- livedrive.com backup, which backs up all changed files on my computer hourly, keeping the 30 most recent versions of each file
- Evernote, which syncs all of my notes across all devices (4 iOS, 3 Macs, 2 Windows) and also has web access
In addition to all of the above, I have two Time Machine external drives on my MBP, one on my MBA and one on my wife's iMac. All of them are dual RAID configured mirrored drives, so each one has built in protection against a single drive failure. Time Machine offers a critical service that none of the other backups have; If I have to wipe and restore a drive in any computer (or get a new computer), when I run the install procedure it will automatically restore the entire disk file structure from the most recent Time Machine backup, so I don't have to think about the details or wonder about the best place to restore each file from.
Posted on Mar 30, 2016 6:42 AM