Essential practice for preserving all of your important documents, photos and files in macOS
Protecting your data should be a natural, and ideally near invisible, part of your computing regime, but it is also a remarkably easy thing to forget about. Apple has managed to make iCloud feel seamless in day to day use and for most people it serves the dual purpose of allowing easy file access while offering backups for all of your important data. Whether it is photos, files, receipts or anything else there are a variety of options open to you to protect your data and we would advise you to always have a ‘hard’ copy if you can.
Multiple cloud solutions will offer reassurance that your data can be retrieved should the worst happen, but they can cost money through subscriptions. Moreover the sense of having a local copy will actually help to reduce your stress levels.
We will guide you through the tools that Apple provides and also offer advice for thirdparty software and hardware solutions that will give you all of the backup facilities you need. When you are upgrading to a new operating system like Ventura you should always back up all of your data first! It is priceless after all.
The default option
There is no doubt that Apple wants you to use iCloud no matter what device you are using. For a Mac the process is slightly different to an iPhone or iPad because full backups are stored for mobile devices. For Macs you can only store certain bits of information rather than a complete backup, but it is worthy for much of your personal information.
The initial setup
If you are using iCloud Drive on your Mac you will need to do some preparatory work before you start using Time Machine. It is likely that iCloud Drive saves space on your Mac and that the two are very much interlinked.
1 What are you using?
Go to System Preferences, click your name at the top and ‘iCloud’. Click ‘Manage’ to see how much space you are using. It could be more than your Mac can store.
2 iCloud Drive options
Click ‘Options’ next to ‘iCloud Drive’ in System Preferences to choose which macOS folders are stored in iCloud. Minimising these helps with Time Machine backups.
3 Stop optimising
To back up everything in Time Machine uncheck the ‘Optimise Mac Storage’ in System Preferences. Be careful in case this causes your Mac to lose too much space.
Setting up Time Machine
The setup process for Time Machine is surprisingly simple and only takes a couple of minutes to complete. The actual backing up procedure takes a lot longer, but the trick is to make it as invisible as possible if you are using Time Machine regularly. You can tweak your settings at any time until they fit your routine.
1 The right device
You need a physical drive to use Time Machine an
