Protect your digital life

Safeguard your data, in case of disaster

Never lose a song, photo, or file again with our complete guide to protecting your data. Learn how to back up with Time Machine, safeguard your photos and video, and store files in iCloud.

Modern life is increasingly reliant on digital content, which impacts heavily on things that are important to us all. Cherished memories exist as photos and videos inside of computers. Schedules and appointments appear on calendars on your Mac, rather than scrawled on paper equivalents pinned to a wall. Essential documents for managing your home and work are less commonly printed out — again, they often exist only on your Mac. That’s hugely convenient, mostly, but also potentially a big problem. Digital files shouldn’t exist only in one place. After all, what happens if you lose your Mac, or drop it, or it’s fritzed in a massive power outage, or it’s damaged in a fire, flood, or other natural calamity? In the same way, what happens to everything on your iPhone if that device is mislaid or stolen? The simple answer: the data is lost. From pictures of your family to that dissertation you’ve piled months of time into. All gone. This is why it’s vital to back up. When you have only a single copy of a file, it’s vulnerable. For anything you care about, you must make copies on an ongoing basis, just in case disaster strikes. The positive side is that it’s potentially far easier to preserve your valued content in digital form than it ever was to make copies of your family photo album, for example, and store them at your Mom’s for safekeeping. Of course, you could still copy all your stuff to a portable hard drive and store it at your Mom’s. But over the next few pages, we’ll look at a whole range of ways to build and use a robust, complete, fuss-free backup system to significantly reduce the risk that you ever lose data again.