If your computer breaks, it can be fixed. It will cost some money, but you can replace the display, keyboard, mouse, hard drive, and the motherboard. You can even replace the whole computer. Your data, on the other hand, is another story.
The computer is a tool, but the data is your creation. The data represents the hard work you have done. It may be original creations of your own, or data and media you have worked to collect and organize. You can pay to have someone try to recover your data from a failed hard drive, but it doesn’t always work, and it is very common for them to recover only some of your data.
Backing up your data is the only way to be sure that your work is safe. Deciding on a backup strategy is an important step to avoiding tragic loss.
Backup Strategy
Backing up your data simply means having another copy of it on another device, but not all backups are created equal. There are several things to consider when deciding on a backup strategy that will give you good, reliable backups.
- Completeness – Will you backup all of your data, or just some of it?
- Current – Will you backup your data frequently to make sure it’s up to date?
- Location – Will the backup be far enough removed from the original so that whatever bad thing happens to the original does not also happen to the copy?
Manually backing up your data by copying it to another device each time you create or change data is only complete and current if you remember to do it every time. This strategy also generally fails to backup data that you might not be thinking of as data. Such data might include locally stored email, application settings, and media libraries.
Fortunately, better backup strategies are automated strategies, so they are less work for you than the less effective manual backups.
Time Machine
The easiest backup strategy is one of the most effective, and it’s built right in to your Macintosh operating system. It’s called Time Machine.
Time Machine backs up all of the data on your boot drive (and other connected drives if you configure it to do so) to a connected hard drive, or wirelessly to an Apple Time Capsule, so your backups are complete. When you modify documents, it keeps the old revisions backed up as long as there is room on the backup drive. Revision backups is another aspect of completeness.
Time Machine backs up your documents every hour automatically, so your backups are kept up to date. It only backs up what has changed — new files and modified files — so it doesn’t bog down the computer trying to copy everything all over again.
This link will take you to Apple’s document explaining how to easily set up and use Time Machine.
Use Time Machine to back up or restore your Mac
This is an excellent solution for most people. It takes care of 2 out of 3 concerns; completeness and being current. The 3rd concern is location. Time Machine does not provide much help here. Your data will be backed up either to a device connected to the computer, or in the case of a Time Capsule, to a device located somewhere in your home or office.
But what about disasters like fire and flood? If all of the devices holding all of the data are in your home, a disaster like that could eliminate your data (including the backups) as well as whatever other property is damaged. If that sort of thing concerns you, there are options for storing backups of some or all of your data in the cloud.
iCloud Drive
Apple will provide you with 5GB of iCloud storage for free. For most people, that is enough to backup and synchronize Contacts, Calendars, Reminders, Safari bookmarks, Notes, and Keychain. Add Photos and Mail to that, and most people find they will need to pay to upgrade their iCloud storage. As of this writing (9/7/2017), Apple offers the following iCloud storage plans as upgrades to the free 5GB plan:
- 50GB for $0.99 a month
- 200GB for $2.99 a month
- 2TB for $9.99 a month
If you go for the 2TB plan, you can probably add your Desktop & Documents folders to the list of things stored in iCloud, and thus have an off-site backup of your important data, protecting it from all sorts of disasters.
This link will take you to Apple’s document explaining how to easily set up your iCloud drive.
If all of that seems a bit pricey, but you still want to store backups of at least some of your data in the cloud, there are other options.
DropBox / Google Drive / OneDrive
There are other cloud storage options for backing up your data. Which one you use will probably depend how much it costs to backup the amount of data you want to protect.
As of this date (9/13/2017), pricing looks like this:
- Dropbox offers 2GB free (you can earn up to 16GB more with referrals) or 1TB for $99 / year (or $9.99 monthly).
- Google Drive offers 15GB free, 1TB for $9.99 / month, 10TB for $99.99 / month, 20TB for $199.99 / month, and 30TB for $299.99 / month.
- OneDrive offers 5GB free, 50GB for $1.99 / month, or 1TB for $6.99 / month (or $69.99 / year). They also offer a discount for a group of 5 accounts of 1TB each.
Each of these services offer a synchronizing feature. That means that everything you put in a particular folder is automatically backed up to the cloud. You would just have to remember to save important documents to this folder instead of your Desktop or Documents folder.
Summary
The easiest solution for backing up your data is to use Time Machine. The software is already part of your computer’s operating system. It backs up all of the data on the computer, and even keeps revision backups. You should supplement that with iCloud storage or some other cloud based storage to backup your most critical documents. Depending on how much of your data is critical, this cloud storage might be free, or it might cost a bit. Chances are, you won’t need more than $10 a month.
Remember, your data is irreplaceable, but if you have it backed up, it’s recoverable.