teach novice how to back up all data automiatcally. Actual Back Up programming, not synchronization.

Time Machine makes hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for all previous months.

Back up your Mac with Time Machine - Apple Support

What's backed up by Time Machine

• Your apps, music, photos, emails, documents, and system files
• iCloud Content: If files or photos from iCloud Drive or iCloud Photos are downloaded/locally present on your Mac's internal drive, Time Machine will back them up into its historical timeline. However, if an iCloud file is "optimized" (stored only in the cloud and downloaded on demand), it might not be copied until it is physically on your Mac (see below).

How to Set It Up

1. Connect your external hard drive to your Mac.
2. Go to the Apple menu () and select System Settings.
3. Click General in the sidebar, then click Time Machine on the right.
4. Click Add Backup Disk (or the + button) and select your external drive.
5. Choose Set Up Disk and follow the prompts to encrypt your backup for security.

Time Machine runs automatically in the background as long as your drive is plugged in, creating local time-specific snapshots that remain completely isolated from iCloud, Google Drive, or OneDrive.

It’s recommended to back up to an external drive that is 2-3x the size of your internal storage. External storage is relatively inexpensive, a 1 TB SSD or a 2-4 TB HDD can be purchased for <$200 (prices have gone up significantly in recent months, unfortunately). Consider that one backup may not be enough, a commonly recommended strategy is 3-2-1 where you have three copies of your data, two of which are backups and one of which is stored offsite.

If you want to ensure optimized iCloud files (like offloaded photos or documents) are fully captured locally, then you have to turn off the Optimize Mac Storage setting in your system settings.

1. Open System Settings
2. Click your Apple ID (or your name) at the top of the sidebar.
3. Click iCloud, then click iCloud Drive.
4. Turn off Optimize Mac Storage.
5. Make sure your Mac has enough free disk space to store every file currently in your iCloud account

lexilulumolly wrote:

including time specific copies of my iCloud data

In Carbon Copy Cloner you can choose Cloud Storage from CCC's Source selector to configure a task to make a backup of your cloud-only content.

https://support.bombich.com/hc/en-us/articles/20686419951767-Backing-up-the-content-of-cloud-storage-volumes