Hello, I'd love to get opinions as to the best cloud backup service. I want to back up family photos, videos and some documents. They are already backed up on external hard drives but I'd like an additional backup method. I'm not sure I chose the best topic so please advise if I should change that. Thank you.
iMac 21.5″, macOS 13.0
Hi Bondia -
That page is very helpful. However, even after reading it, I'm not sure what you mean by "your photos are not duplicated in an iCloud backup." Can you explain that to me in a really basic way? What is an iCloud backup?
JJRASC was referring to iOS and iPadOS device backups that have an iCloud backup feature. Mac computers do not.
I do use iCloud Photos and I like to store my originals on my Mac. This works fine except I'm running out of room on my Mac. Also I've recently digitized, and edited with iMovie, some old VHS home videos. Those take up so much room I can't keep them on my Mac and I have to keep them on an external hard drive
I think what might work best for you is to purchase a large external solid state drive (SSD) to store your large Photo and iMovie libraries on, along with the final copies of your projects. That way, you can configure Photos to download originals to your Mac, without using any storage space on your Mac's startup disk. Additionally, you can edit in iMovie, without worrying about using a large amount of disk space on your Mac.
Apple has documentation on how to accomplish this:
An excellent external SSD choice for this task is the OWC Envoy Pro Elektron - OWC. When you receive it, erase it, and format it as APFS:
Erase and reformat a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support
You can then add this external SSD with its contents to your local Time Machine backup going to the other external hard disk you stated you use. To do this, verify the external SSD is NOT on the exclude list:
Exclude files from a Time Machine backup on Mac - Apple Support.
If you need a larger Time Machine drive for this, a very large, high-performance, external desktop-class hard disk would serve you well: OWC Mercury Elite Pro - OWC.
I'd also like to back up with a cloud service.
To backup everything to the cloud, unfortunately, iCloud does not offer the ability to store copies of the contents of external disks. However, a third-party service, such as Backblaze, does. With Backblaze, you can backup the contents of your Mac's startup disk and any data on external disks to the cloud: Backing up External Hard Drives - Backblaze Help.
Doing all of the above would in the end accomplish the following:
I hope this helps!
Jack
Hi Bondia -
That page is very helpful. However, even after reading it, I'm not sure what you mean by "your photos are not duplicated in an iCloud backup." Can you explain that to me in a really basic way? What is an iCloud backup?
JJRASC was referring to iOS and iPadOS device backups that have an iCloud backup feature. Mac computers do not.
I do use iCloud Photos and I like to store my originals on my Mac. This works fine except I'm running out of room on my Mac. Also I've recently digitized, and edited with iMovie, some old VHS home videos. Those take up so much room I can't keep them on my Mac and I have to keep them on an external hard drive
I think what might work best for you is to purchase a large external solid state drive (SSD) to store your large Photo and iMovie libraries on, along with the final copies of your projects. That way, you can configure Photos to download originals to your Mac, without using any storage space on your Mac's startup disk. Additionally, you can edit in iMovie, without worrying about using a large amount of disk space on your Mac.
Apple has documentation on how to accomplish this:
An excellent external SSD choice for this task is the OWC Envoy Pro Elektron - OWC. When you receive it, erase it, and format it as APFS:
Erase and reformat a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support
You can then add this external SSD with its contents to your local Time Machine backup going to the other external hard disk you stated you use. To do this, verify the external SSD is NOT on the exclude list:
Exclude files from a Time Machine backup on Mac - Apple Support.
If you need a larger Time Machine drive for this, a very large, high-performance, external desktop-class hard disk would serve you well: OWC Mercury Elite Pro - OWC.
I'd also like to back up with a cloud service.
To backup everything to the cloud, unfortunately, iCloud does not offer the ability to store copies of the contents of external disks. However, a third-party service, such as Backblaze, does. With Backblaze, you can backup the contents of your Mac's startup disk and any data on external disks to the cloud: Backing up External Hard Drives - Backblaze Help.
Doing all of the above would in the end accomplish the following:
I hope this helps!
Jack
Hello Bondia,
Welcome to the Apple Support Communities.
One option may be to use iCloud Photos. This feature works with the Photos app to keep your photos and videos stored in iCloud and synced with your other supported devices.
When you turn on iCloud Photos, your photos are not duplicated in an iCloud backup, so you should still keep the existing backups that you have created.
You can learn more about iCloud Photos online here: Set up and use iCloud Photos.
Have a great day!
I do not trust iCloud because the files are not under my control; I am dependent on someone else's servers and their security. Those are hacked into regularly; there may not be any financial info to steal, but I would not like to have my photos at risk. I feel much better having my files under my control and external drives are great for that. I store one set off site (someone's garage) in case of a fire here and most of mine are regular hard drives - for storage you do not need super fast drives (SSDs) as there is no need to spend more than necessary. I prefer using smaller drives, but more of them because I like to keep at least 2 - 3 backup copies of anything important. So movie A is on drives 1 and 3 and B may be on 1 and 4. In other words, I want 2 - 3 copies so I will have at least 1 or 2 if one of them dies or malfunctions.
Thank you, JJRASC. That page is very helpful. However, even after reading it, I'm not sure what you mean by "your photos are not duplicated in an iCloud backup." Can you explain that to me in a really basic way? What is an iCloud backup?
I do use iCloud Photos and I like to store my originals on my Mac. This works fine except I'm running out of room on my Mac. Also I've recently digitized, and edited with iMovie, some old VHS home videos. Those take up so much room I can't keep them on my Mac and I have to keep them on an external hard drive which I'd also like to back up with a cloud service. I can't include those in my Photos on my Mac and back them up to iCloud as they are just too big.
Thank you again. I appreciate your help.
Hello Jack, this is all such helpful information, thank you very much. I appreciate the clarification about back ups. Tonight I'm going to read all the Apple Support information you linked me to. I didn't realize that information was available.
If you don't mind a follow up question - why do you prefer an SSD over a hard drive? I read online that SSDs can lose data, something about electrons leaking (which I admit I don't understand.)
Thank you for taking the time to explain all this to me, it's so helpful and I really appreciate it.
Hello Jack, this is all such helpful information, thank you very much. I appreciate the clarification about back ups. Tonight I'm going to read all the Apple Support information you linked me to. I didn't realize that information was available.
If you don't mind a follow up question - why do you prefer an SSD over a hard drive? I read online that SSDs can lose data, something about electrons leaking (which I admit I don't understand.)
Thank you for taking the time to explain all this to me, it's so helpful and I really appreciate it.
You're very welcome! :-)
SSDs work best for storing content libraries that you'll be working with, such as Photos and iMovie, due to their amazing performance. SSDs are much faster than hard disks, up to 92x faster.
While hard disks are substantially slower than SSDs, they still have their place, such as for backing up large amounts of data since performance isn't as important for backups - capacity is.
Jack
Also, I wanted to provide these other suggestions for a new SSD and hard disk (for Time Machine, if needed):
When I posted originally, these products were out of stock.
Jack
Thank you for the clarification, Jack.
Thank you, babowa. I plan to have probably four copies of everything, most at different people's houses. I worry about fire, too, and flooding. Thank you for the information.
You prefer LaCie over WD? I've used both.
What is the best cloud backup service for family photos/videos?
