There is a saying that there are two kinds of people in the world. have For those who have experienced massive data loss, intention Massive data loss will occur. World Backup Day is a good time to make sure you don’t fall into the second category.
Fortunately, Apple devices make it very easy to automatically maintain backups, but it’s still worrying how many people neglect to do so…
Risk of data loss
Personal data stored on Apple devices can literally be valuable, with photos and videos being the most obvious example. For example, imagine a parent loses a video of a toddler taking his or her first steps. Most of us have photos and videos that are only stored digitally, and losing them forever is heartbreaking.
There are many other types of data whose loss can cause significant problems. Imagine losing your calendar data and losing all records of your upcoming meetings, appointments, and plans. What if you lose all your financial records and have to explain it to the IRS next tax season?
Other examples that can have a big impact include losing all your saved passwords, Apple notes, saved emails, and even text messages that have sentimental value.
By some estimates, approximately 140,000 hard drives fail every week. Another is that 113 phones are lost or stolen every minute.
“One is nothing, two is one.”
Another IT adage is “one is nothing, two is one.” In other words, even if only one copy of the data exists, a media failure can quickly cause it to disappear. If you have two copies, you may soon have only one in the same situation.
It is a best practice to have at least three copies of critical data, one of which is stored remotely. Fortunately, cloud services make this very easy and require no effort after the initial setup.
How to back up your iPhone and iPad
The easiest and most common way to back up your iPhone and iPad is to use iCloud. Apple inexplicably still limits the free tier to 5GB, so you’ll need a paid subscription to do this.
Open the Settings app, tap your name at the top of the screen, then tap iCloud > iCloud Backup. Make sure “Back up this iPhone” is turned on. If not, toggle it on and tap the (Backup Now) button.
If you don’t already have a paid iCloud+ subscription, go to Settings > iCloud, scroll down to iCloud+ Features, and tap the Manage Plans button.
The decision you need to make is whether to back up via mobile data or wait until you have a Wi-Fi connection. This is sufficient for most people, as long as their devices are connected to Wi-Fi whenever they are at home. However, if you have an unlimited or sufficient data plan, it is safest to turn on the option to back up over mobile data.
Inside the iCloud section, look for the Save to iCloud panel and tap See All. Make sure all data you want to protect is turned on. This includes photos, emails, passwords, notes, messages, calendars, contacts, reminders, and more. This saves all of these data categories in iCloud independently of your iPhone backups.
As an alternative or supplement to iCloud backup, you can back up your iPhone to your Mac. Click here for instructions. Note that local backups to devices stored at home with your iPhone can result in the loss of all data in the event of a house fire or natural disaster. Other options include third-party apps for iOS devices, external drives, and third-party cloud services like Dropbox.
However, iCloud backup is highly recommended as it is a “set it and forget it” feature.
How to back up your Mac locally
Once again, Apple makes automatic backups very easy to achieve.
Time Machine is a powerful automatic backup feature for your Mac. If you don’t already have a Time Machine backup, just connect an external drive with enough space to your Mac. You will be asked if you want to use Time Machine.
One of the important features of Time Machine is to create so-called versioned backups. This means that it stores not only your Mac’s current content, but also incremental backups of varying time periods. This feature comes into its own when you delete a file and then realize that you still need it. Time Machine is so named because it allows you to go back in time in any folder and find backup versions of files from before you deleted them.
The larger the external drive you use, the more versions it will keep. You should choose a drive that is at least twice the capacity of your Mac’s SSD, but bigger is better.
You can save money by using a rotating metal hard drive instead of an SSD. The first backup will take some time, but subsequent backups are easy. Hard drives are significantly cheaper than SSDs. That means it’s affordable to use a hard drive that’s four or even eight times the capacity of a Mac for very extensive, versioned backups.
If you want to be even more selective, you can use multiple external drives for your Time Machine backups, and your Mac will automatically switch between them.
Mac cloud backup
However, the previous caveat about the risks of having only locally stored backups still applies here. We highly recommend using cloud services to save copies of your most important files.
In most cases, the things you need to back up to the cloud are your desktop and documents folders. This support document from Apple provides comprehensive instructions on how to do this using iCloud.
You can also use third-party cloud services. I personally use Dropbox and make sure all my documents are stored within the top-level Dropbox folder.
Not only does this mean everything is automatically backed up to the cloud, but it also means you can remotely access the documents you need even when you’re away from your Mac. There is an optional versioned backup add-on, which I enabled. This works in a similar way to Time Machine.
Photo by William Warby on Unsplash
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