Make your backups leaner

Need your backups to be a little more svelte? Here’s how…

The idea of making backups leaner might seem odd. After all, surely the aim with backups is that you’re backing everything up, in case of disaster? Well, sort of. It ultimately depends how many backups you’re making, where you’re making them to, and what information you care about.

For example, if your iTunes media (music, books, videos) never gets updated because you now only do streaming, and it’s on some stashed backup drives in a drawer, you probably don’t need it cluttering up your daily backup drives too, which could be better put to use dealing with important current content.

Be a little wary, however, on streamlining backups, as per our do and don’t tips seen on the right of this page. And remember, for a fully robust system, you will need to twin the likes of Time Machine with a cloud–based backup (see details on the opposite page).