Apple Backup Strategy – Time Machine – External Hard Drives
Are you backing up your valuable data (photos, documents etc.)?
It is very important to back up your valuable pictures, documents in 2 or more locations. Scott prefers to use Time Machine (software already on the computer) to back up to 1-2 external hard drives on a regular basis.
If at least one of these backup drives are protected (fire safe, safe deposit box), you effectively have your own cloud storage.
Other methods for backup include using Carbon Copy Cloner software, iCloud storage etc.
From experience, Scott has seen data/folders disappear from the iCloud Drive. A feature called Desktop and Documents, which is turned on by default, will automatically upload anything on the Desktop and in Documents to iCloud.
A customer with 4 different computers using this feature ended up breaking the automatic synchronization and lost an important work folder. Thankfully, Scott had a copy of that folder on his backup server.
Another feature that is turned on by default is iCloud Optimize iCloud Storage. Scott prefers to have this feature turned off. When this setting is on, the Cloud decides what information is downloaded to the computer. If it isn’t on the computer, then Time Machine will not be backing it up to a local hard drive.