Time Machine can also be used to do a complete restore from this local drive.
iCloud, of course, is only going to save the files that are in iCloud Drive that may be just your iCloud Drive folder or your Documents folder and your Desktop folder as well depending upon your settings. Time Machine will even save things that are on other external drives connected to your Mac. It's saving even your Applications and the System files. Anything you've saved to other local folders. It's backing up your Preferences files, it's backing up local files like things in your Movies folder or maybe your iMovie projects. If you want to go back to how that file was yesterday, or last month, or six months ago having Time Machine is invaluable because you can go back in time and grab that old version of the fileĪnother thing about Time Machine is that it backs up everything on the drive. So if you change a file today that file is just the current version of the file. So if you're working on a Pages document you can revert to earlier versions. Now a lot of Apple apps, like Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, already save old versions of the file inside the file itself. Depending on how much space you've got you can have many versions of this file going all the back to the original version you created. So if you change a file today, after a backup you'll have a backup of today's file but you'll also have a backup of how the file was yesterday. Time Machine also saves changes to files. If you get a nice big drive you can have deleted files going back years. As a matter of fact the limit really depends on how much space is on the drive. You can go back in time to find an old file. So if you've deleted a file from a folder Time Machine will still have that in an older version of that folder. So incremental backups can be very quick. It doesn't need to do anything with the other 997.
HOW TO BACKUP MAC TO ICLOUD 2020 UPDATE
It's an incremental backup which means if you have a thousand files and you only change three of them the next backup would only update those three files. So you're backing up to a local hard drive like maybe one of these that you connected directly to your Mac or perhaps to your network at home. Now Time Machine is a very different thing. Although different services may vary for how long they keep deleted items. If disaster strikes you can log back onto your Cloud account and find those files there. If you're using Dropbox or Microsoft or Goggle you also have this second location where your files are stored. The same is true if you're using another Cloud solution. You can also see recently deleted photos in the Photos app. So if you accidentally delete a file you could actually go and view the recently deleted files in the iCloud Drive section or the recently deleted photos in the photos section and recover an item that you accidentally deleted. In those cases if you have all your files on iCloud Drive and all your photos on iCloud Photos then you could get a new Mac and simply logon iCloud and you would have your files back.Ī second way that iCloud Drive and iCloud Photos act as a backup is that if you delete a file or a photo it's actually moved to a recently deleted folder. Of course one of the most common things that can happen to your Mac is if it gets stolen especially if you've got a MacBook that you carry around with you. You could loose them if there's a disaster like say a fire, flood, or maybe a toddler with a glass of milk. So you could loose your files if say your Mac or just your Mac's hard drive break. One is to protect you in case you loose your files. So there are two ways that iCloud Drive and iCloud Photos work as a backup.
So in a way it does work a little bit like a backup as does provide you with some protection. In addition to syncing your files across all your devices it's also storing them on Apple's iCloud servers. You can also see those files on your iPhone and iPad. So you can save a file on one Mac, say your desktop iMac, and then see that same file on your MacBook. So iCloud, and specifically iCloud Drive and also iCloud Photos, is a way for you to sync your files and photos between your Macs and other Apple devices. If you want to backup the files on your Mac you need to use Time Machine to do that. But iCloud really isn't a backup solution. Often I hear from Mac users that they use iCloud to backup the files on their Mac. There you can read more about the Patreon Campaign. MacMost is supported by viewers just like you. Let's talk about backing up the files on your Mac using iCloud and why it really isn't a substitute for using a real backup like Time Machine. Check out iCloud Is Not a Substitute For a Time Machine Backup With Your Mac at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.