Why backups matter

Because there’s nothing worse than losing all your stuff

Whether your Mac’s been stolen, splashed with a hot cup of tea or driven off a cliff in a clown car, having all your stuff go ‘Whizz! Bam! Pow!’ is heartbreaking, devastating and likely to make you a teensy bit cross. Don’t let it happen!

The more digital our lives become, the more important it is to protect our data; it’s our memories, our videos of the kids’ first steps or the day we brought the dog home, our wedding photos and the photos of people we’ve loved and sometimes lost. As awful as losing your Mac would be, losing the memories that live on it would be absolutely devastating.

But we have iCloud! Well, yes, we do. But iCloud is not a backup service. It’s a file sharing and synchronisation service, and that means if something such as a video gets damaged or deleted on one device it’ll be damaged or deleted across all your other devices too. iCloud does keep a recently deleted folder for files and one for photos, so you’ve got 30 days to notice and restore the missing file or photo, but it’s not something you should rely upon.

Incremental backups

The best backups happen regularly, are stored on different devices and/or in different premises and are incremental – so you do one massive backup at the beginning, and in future the software only backs up the bits that have been added since. That means you have a backup of everything without eating up online, SSD or hard drive space; for example, our Time Machine backup of absolutely everything on one of the office Macs goes back 124 weeks and still only takes up just over 1TB of data – which sounds like a lot but that’s for 124 backups of a Mac with 260GB on it. If those backups weren’t incremental, we’d need a drive with 32TB of storage space, which currently costs about £1,600.