“The free availability of Time Machine coupled with Apple’s all-in-one router and backup drive, Time Capsule, definitely makes it difficult for any company to have a viable market for networked Mac backups,” Glenn Fleishman writes for Macworld. “However, there are a few options you could consider.”
“I don’t use Time Machine, so I’ve combined hosted internet backups for my media files, email, and documents with a local nightly clone of my hard drive,” Fleishman writes.
“If my local system were destroyed (say, in a fire), I’d be able to retrieve everything I’d ever created,” Fleishman writes, “and if my boot drive dies, I can swap over to a clone that’s just hours old.”
How to do it here.
MacDailyNews Take: You’re not really backed up unless you have an off-site backup (or backups).
SuperDuper does it for me.
CCC for me locally, but the sheer size of the clone makes it undoable for a cloud based backup. A drive on the local network in the same physical building doesn’t do any better than an external drive connected to your system. Just cannot backup 60-500GB or more to the cloud cheaply or quickly. Not until Internet and transfer speeds reach at least 10GBPS. Check back in the 23rd century maybe.
Use something like Crashplan for off-site backup. It sends only changes, which is doable over the Internet.
You don’t even have to pay them – their software is free. And, you can pre-load a local disk, then swap pre-loaded off-site-backup disks with a friend. The backups are encrypted, so the friend can’t read your data (nor you theirs). Of course, you could make the backup unavailable to them, but don’t have to worry they can go through it and read it.
I have a system where I use TM to back up a couple of encrypted hard drives. One is usually at my office and I bring it in from time to time. The disk that stays at home is also backed up via BackBlaze along with everything else.
Fortunately my recent move gave me a great fibre connection, but beforehand I had luck with laptops at least by bringing them to the library of a university near me. Universities always have excellent internet if you can access it.
My usual warning about Backblaze:
They lost my data and blamed it on me losing my encryption key, despite my looking right at it. They then told me to shove off and never come back, after kindly returning money for the unused portion of my account contract. IOW: Trust Backblaze not.
I posted the above once. If you see it again below, NMF (not my fault).
My usual warning about Backblaze:
They lost my data and blamed it on me losing my encryption key, despite my looking right at it. They then told me to shove off and never come back, after kindly returning money for the unused portion of my account contract. IOW: Trust Backblaze not.