Gadronics
There’s a saying that there are two types of people in the world: those who have experienced major data loss and those who will experience major data loss. World Backup Day is a good time to ensure that you’re protected against falling into the second category.
Fortunately, Apple devices make it very simple to keep them automatically backed up, but it is still worrying how many people fail to do so …
The risks of data loss
The personal data we store on our Apple devices can be literally priceless, with photos and videos the most obvious example. Imagine parents losing the video they shot of their toddler taking their very first steps, for example. Most of us have photos and videos that are only stored digitally and would be heartbreaking to lose forever.
There are many other types of data whose loss could cause us major problems. Imagine that your calendar data was lost and you now have no record of all your future meetings, appointments, and plans. What if you lost all your financial records and had to explain that to the IRS next tax season?
Other examples that could have major implications are losing all your stored passwords, Apple Notes, your stored emails, and even text messages with sentimental value.
One estimate suggests that around 140,000 hard drives fail every week. Another that 113 phones are lost or stolen every single minute.
‘One is none, two is one’
Another IT saying is that “one is none and two is one.” In other words, having a single copy of your data can instantly turn into no copies when your media fails. Having two copies can very quickly reduce you to having just one in the same circumstances.
Best practice is to have at least three copies of your important data, with one of them stored remotely. Fortunately, cloud services make this extremely easy to achieve, with zero effort after initial setup.
How to back up your iPhone and iPad
The simplest and most popular way to back up your iPhone and iPad is to iCloud. Since Apple inexplicably still limits the free tier to just 5GB, you will need a paid subscription to do this.
Open the Settings app, tap your name at the top of the screen, then iCloud > iCloud Backup. Make sure that “Back Up This iPhone” is toggled on. If it’s not, then toggle it on and then tap the Back Up Now button.
If you don’t yet have a paid iCloud+ subscription, then Settings > iCloud and scroll down to “iCloud+ features” and tap the Manage Plan button.
One decision you’ll need to make is whether to back up over mobile data or wait until you’re on a Wi-Fi connection. So long as your device is connected to Wi-Fi whenever you’re at home, this will be good enough for most people. However, if you have either unlimited data or a generous data plan, then toggling on the option to back up over mobile data is the safest course.
While you’re within the iCloud section, check the Saved to iCloud panel and tap See All. Make sure that all the data you want to protect is toggled on. This includes photos, email, password, notes, messages, calendar, contacts, reminders, and more. This ensures that all of these data categories are saved to iCloud independently of your iPhone backups.
As an alternative or supplement to an iCloud backup, you can back up an iPhone to your Mac, and you’ll find instructions for that here. Bear in mind that a local backup to a device stored in the home with your iPhone leaves you vulnerable to losing all your data in the event of a house fire or natural disaster. Other options include third-party apps and external drives for iOS devices, as well as third-party cloud services like Dropbox.
However, iCloud backup is strongly recommended because it’s a “set it and forget it” feature.
How to backup your Mac locally
Again, Apple makes automatic backups extremely easy to achieve.
Time Machine is a powerful automated backup feature for Macs. If you don’t already have a Time Machine backup, then all you need to do is connect a sufficiently large external drive to your Mac and you will be asked whether or not you want to use it for Time Machine.
One of the key features of Time Machine is that it creates what are called versioned backups. That is to say, it keeps incremental backups for various periods of time, not just the current content of your Mac. This feature comes into its own when you delete a file and later realize that you still need it. Time Machine is so named because you can go back in time within any folder and find a backup version before you deleted the file.
The larger the external drive you use, the more versions will be retained. As a minimum, you want to choose a drive that is at least twice as big as the capacity of your Mac’s SSD, but more is better.
You can save money by using a spinning metal hard drive over an SSD. The initial backup will take longer, but it will easily keep up after that. Hard drives are significantly cheaper than SSDs, meaning that it will be affordable to use one that has four or even eight times the capacity of your Mac for very extensive versioned backups.
If you want to be even more careful, you can use more than one external drive for Time Machine backups, and your Mac will automatically alternate between them.
Cloud backups of Macs
However, our earlier cautionary note about the risks of having only a locally stored backup still apply here. It’s strongly advisable to use a cloud service to store copies of your most vital files.
In most cases, it’s your desktop and documents folders you’ll want to back up to the cloud. Apple has comprehensive instructions for doing this with iCloud in this support document.
You can also use third-party cloud services. I personally use Dropbox and ensure that all of my documents are stored within the top-level Dropbox folder.
This not only means that everything is automatically backed up to the cloud, but also that I have remote access to any documents I may need while away from my Mac. There’s an optional versioned backup add-on which I have enabled, working in a similar way to Time Machine.
Photo by William Warby on Unsplash
