Why You Should Consider an Online Backup

Even if you are already backup up with Time Machine locally, you should consider having an online backup as well. Here are the reasons you may want to have a second backup online, or why you may be fine just using Time Machine and iCloud.


Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's talk about whether or not you should consider having an online backup.
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There something I, and a lot of Mac users do, is have an online backup in addition to a local backup. So first, of course, before you even consider an online backup you should have a local backup. Using Time Machine it is really simple. You just get an external hard drive, you plug it into your Mac Mini, Mac Studio, or iMac and it will automatically backup every hour. If you have a MacBook it is a little tougher. You have to plug it in, maybe when it is at your desk or wherever you keep it most, but it will just run automatically and keep a local backup. You should do this first. Time Machine backup is easy and it is inexpensive to do and keeps not just copies of all your files but a history as well. It's more common to need a backup to recover a file. You accidentally delete it or maybe you delete some content from inside the file and you want to revert to an earlier version. That's more common than, say, having to do disaster recovery where you loose all the data on a hard drive or your Mac and you need to recover all of your files at once. Having that Time Machine backup makes it easy to go back and recover a single file or group of files from yesterday, a month ago, a year ago.
Now sometimes people will do a second backup that's also a Time Machine backup. That's fine but it's not better than an online backup and I'll explain why. Another option people do is have a clone of their drive as a backup. I've done a video on this before. A clone is not as good as a Time Machine backup because it doesn't keep a history of your files. A clone is an exact duplicate of your drive. So if you delete a file yesterday and then the drive is cloned that clone is not going to have that file either. If you want to get that file back it's not going to be on the clone but it would be on a Time Machine backup because you can go back to yesterday's state and find that file there.
Now when considering whether or not to do an online backup it's important to take a look at how you use your Mac. If you use your Mac for work and there are critical files that you've got, then online backup, I would say, is a must have. If instead you just have hobby files on your Mac, local files for your personal use and loosing them wouldn't be a huge deal then it is not as important. Think through different scenarios. Think about the most important files that you've got, what would happen if you loose them. Would it simply be an inconvenience either to recreate those files or maybe just to deal with not having them. If so then probably an online backup isn't as critical.
An online backup really does two things for you. First it acts as a second backup. A second backup is always a good idea. I mean it's very unlikely you're going to loose you primary files and there's also going to be a problem with the backup. But a second backup protects against that. A lot of people like to have a second backup for that reason. An online backup serves as that second backup. But the other reason for an online backup is it's a backup in another location. Consider that your Mac and your backup are probably in the same location. Maybe even right next to each other most of the time. So you can very easily loose both in some sort of disaster and then you don't have your files at all. An online backup would be in a second location and you could get your files even if you have lost everything locally. Another advantage to an online backup is they are easy to maintain if you're using a MacBook. Time Machine backups can be difficult for MacBook users because you have to remember to plug that drive in or you're got to configure your local network with a network attached software device or have some sort of other way of backing up to another drive on another Mac. It depends on your network. It depends on your remembering to do things. It is just going to take a lot of extra effort.
But an online backup doesn't take any of that extra effort. It would just work over WiFi when you're connected at home, where you're connected at school, where you're connected at work. This also makes it ideal for people that travel a lot. When you travel you're probably not going to bring your Time Machine drive with you. But if you're doing an online backup you're going to be able to backup whether you're at home, or whether you're traveling and on the other side of the world. The backup will just run in the background, automatically, no matter where you are as long as you've got WiFi.
Now some people ask, well I do have an online backup. It's iCloud. If you store your files on iCloud Drive, for instance you have a Desktop & Documents in iCloud Drive turned on. You've got everything in Documents. Then, in fact, your files are indeed also on iCloud Drive and that is in another location. That's on Apple servers, not in your home. So it does qualify as having your files in a second location. Now it is important to remember that iCloud Drive is not technically a backup. It's Cloud Storage. So you've got copies of all your files there and it will work, kind of, as a backup if, say, you loose your Mac. You get a new Mac. You sign into iCloud and all your stuff's there. But it doesn't have that version history and it doesn't allow you to recover files that you may have accidentally deleted. It does have some ability to do that. I mean when you move something to the Trash it is in the Trash. Even if you delete something in iCloud Drive online it still is in Recently Deleted for 30 days. So it does have a lot of aspects as a backup. But not a true backup. However for a lot of users, especially ones that are not using their Macs for critical work files, then having a Time Machine backup and also storing your files in iCloud Drive can be a really good combination and good enough for what you do.
For most casual Mac users this is exactly what I would recommend. Have a Time Machine backup and keep it up to date when you can and use iCloud Drive to store all your files so you also have copies of those off site in case of a disaster.
Alright, so say you're convinced. You think it is going to be easier to do an online backup because you have a MacBook or because you travel a lot, or you just think it is going to be good because you have critical work files and you want to make sure you've got a secure second backup in another location. Where do you go? Well, there are a variety of different services. I'm not really going to recommend one specifically. I will be up front and tell you I use Backblaze and that's the one that I just picked and I've been using it for years and I haven't had any trouble with it. But there are other services as well. For instance different articles recommend iDrive or Arqbackup and you can use any of these. All of these will serve the same purpose of having an online backup so you can have a second backup and also one that's in another location. Remember that all Cloud services are basically the same as iCloud Drive in this respect. You can store your files in Goggle Drive or DropBox or OneDrive and they will serve as having your files in another location. But they are not true backups like Time Machine Backup or one of these online backup services where history of files is kept.
So I hope you found this useful in deciding whether or not you should have an online backup as your primary backup or as a second backup for the data on your Mac. Thanks for watching.
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