Have you ever been in a situation where your Mac died on you? If yes, did you have a backup? In most instances, we never prepare for such scenarios. It’s always important to have a full backup because anything can happen. You might delete important documents unintentionally. Or spill water on your computer while working. Even if you’ve saved your content on iCloud, you have to do a full backup. In this article, we are going to examine some of the most effective backup solutions for your Mac device. Using these solutions will ensure that you recover your content when your computer gets wiped out.
Here are some of the reasons why you should consider backing up your Mac today:
As we said earlier, there are many ways to back up your computer. However, if you had to choose a single way to back up your machine, which one is the best?
The cheapest and easiest solution is to back up using Apple’s free backup software – Time Machine. The only expense that you’ll incur is buying an external drive. However, you can buy 1TB of storage for less than 30 bucks nowadays. Therefore, you don’t have to break the bank. Before you start this exercise, you need to ensure that your computer is fast. For this to happen, you have to use the tips that reportedly help to clear cache on Mac (you can find more info at Clean My Mac X. By doing this, you’ll not only save time but also ensure that you save all your files successfully.
Time Machine is a great solution. However, it’s not the only solution out there. You can consider using a solution where your backup is not in the same location as your computer. Other great backup software includes Carbon Copy Cloner, Acronis, and ChronoSync to name a few.
One of the major advantages of using Apple products is you’ll get to save content on your device in iCloud. If you lose or change your computer or phone, you can use iCloud to recover all your data and settings to your new gadget. While iCloud is a great solution, you should keep in mind that you’ll still need an external hard drive. This is because you cannot back up your entire computer to iCloud. Plus, Time Machine doesn’t work with iCloud. You can use iCloud to back up your content. You can sync certain files to iCloud from your Mac automatically. For iCloud storage, you’ll need to pay the following subscription prices every month:
US - $9.99 (2TB), $2.99 (200GB), 99c (50GB)
UK - £6.99 (2TB), £2.49 (200GB), 79p (50GB)
Time Machine allows you to use your backup drive to recover your Mac in case it fails. A clone is not similar to a Time Machine backup since you can connect any Mac to it and have the machine boot from it. It’s one of the best temporary solutions. However, using a clone to recover your Mac is not as simple as it was a few years ago. In recent years, Apple has changed how it organizes startup volume. At the moment, it splits the volume into two. It separates data from the system volume which is sealed. This means that if the seal is broken, it will be invalidated. This will happen if you try booting from an external drive.
Some developers have been working round the clock to solve this problem. However, you can’t entirely rely on these ways since Apple can make changes to the operating system thus making your clone useless. You can still back up data volume using other paid options such as SuperDuper, Carbon Copy Cloner, and ChronoSync.
If you are looking for ways to sync and share important files, there are other great solutions that you can use instead of iCloud. They include Google Drive, Dropbox, and Microsoft OneDrive to name a few. These solutions are used to share files with colleagues or friends and store them. Similar to iCloud, you can store data in the cloud after subscribing to data plans.
While there are a lot of backup solutions on the market, most users think of them after a disaster has happened. Remember, your Mac is exposed to a lot of risks every day. You or a friend might spill a drink on it. Or someone might steal it. If you haven’t stored your documents safely, you might end up losing them together with your computer. Since you don’t want this to happen, it’s always important to back up your files whenever you can. And learn how to use recovery mode. Using the solutions that we’ve discussed in this article will help you stay calm as you restore everything when a disaster happens. How prepared are you?