I am in a situation where I am away from the external HD I normally use for Time Machine backups. I am wondering if it is possible to use a cloud backup service like PCloud or DropBox to temporarily perform the same function until I can return to my home office. Any guidance appreciated.
MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.14
Time Machine will not backup to iCloud or to any other cloud service. See: Back up your Mac with Time Machine - Apple Support
You could however manually copy or move (depending on how much space you have and depending on whether you are comfortable having the only copy be in the iCloud Drive folder) selected files to the iCloud Drive folder on your Mac and have them sync to iCloud. See: iCloud Drive FAQ - Apple Support
Or you could manually copy selected files to Dropbox or another cloud service.
I use Time Machine and I also use a 3rd party cloud backup service even when not traveling so that I have both some redundancy and an offsite backup in case of fire or theft.
Time Machine will not backup to iCloud or to any other cloud service. See: Back up your Mac with Time Machine - Apple Support
You could however manually copy or move (depending on how much space you have and depending on whether you are comfortable having the only copy be in the iCloud Drive folder) selected files to the iCloud Drive folder on your Mac and have them sync to iCloud. See: iCloud Drive FAQ - Apple Support
Or you could manually copy selected files to Dropbox or another cloud service.
I use Time Machine and I also use a 3rd party cloud backup service even when not traveling so that I have both some redundancy and an offsite backup in case of fire or theft.
Don't forget even when your TM backup disks are unavailable, it continues to create "local snapshots" that can be used to restore files, folders, or even an entire system should that be necessary.
Read About Time Machine local snapshots on Mac - Apple Support. Another Apple Support document explains that "Time Machine stores snapshots only on disks that have plenty of free space, and it automatically deletes snapshots as they age or as space is needed for other things."
An earlier Apple Support document that has since been superseded defined "plenty of free space" as less than 80% full. I surmise APFS rendered that value obsolete.
The significant caveat is that if your startup disk should fail catastrophically you're out of luck until you can restore its content from a separate backup device.
Local Snapshots are already being used. You don’t have to do anything to enable them—unless of course you followed some extremely bad advice and explicitly disabled them.
You do not need to remove your existing backup drive from TM’s Preferences either, but if you were to do that it would not affect its existing backups. TM begins to complain after ten days of not being able to back up, but even that is no reason to explicitly remove it. Just reconnect it when it is convenient for you. That backup will take longer to complete as TM exhaustively determines the files that it wasn’t able to back up during that time.
Thanks for the reply. I do have an automatic sync with a cloud service for important folders, but I think these snapshots you've mentioned are exactly what I'm after...but it's not clear to me how to set this up. I'm hesitating to remove my 'regular' backup disk from TM preferences because I want to be sure that when I return to my regular workspace that all of my historical data remains intact. Let's say it's OK to remove that drive for now, there's no way to add a local or network folder in its place, so where would these snapshots be located? Maybe I should have been a little clearer in what my goal is - I'm trying to retain the functionality of Time Machine.... If I were to accidentally delete something 5 days ago from a certain folder, I like knowing I can go back & restore it.
I use Pcloud, and am copying stuff over manually, but I'd like to be able to resume with Time Machine when I return to my main workstation so that it'd work as if I'd never left. Is that possible? That article seems to mention that it is with local snapshots, but it's still not completely clear to me how to accomplish that...I'm sure I'm missing something obvious..apologies!
Temporary use of cloud storage for Time Machine
