Store an Extra Backup Offsite
No matter how many backups you have or how often you update them, they do you no good if they disappear along with your Mac—as they likely will in the case of theft, fire, or any other serious disaster. I urge everyone to take the precautionary step of keeping a second copy of their backups safely away from their Mac, preferably in another building altogether. You can do this with a second hard drive—or, more easily and economically, with a cloud backup service.
Which type(s) of backup should you store offsite? As you’ll recall, the main purpose of a bootable duplicate is to get you back up and running immediately after a disk failure or other crisis, and it can’t perform that function if it’s offsite. So, although you’re welcome to store an extra duplicate offsite if you like, I think of offsite storage as being more appropriate for versioned backups.
Use an Extra Hard Drive
If you purchase two or more hard drives, you can set each of them up the same way. Then, back up to one drive for a week, switch to the other one, and take the first offsite. Repeat this rotation every week or so, and you’ll be safe in the knowledge that if you lose your first backup, a second one is still available that’s no more than a week out of date.
Although you can use this process with just two drives, having three is more convenient (although, of course, more expensive). At any time, you’ll have one drive (A) in use, your next-most-recent one (B) onsite, and your oldest one (C) offsite. When you rotate the drives, you bring your oldest one (C) back onsite and make it active, while taking what has now become the oldest drive (B) offsite—and so on.
The safest way to keep multiple backup drives is to set them up separately. Configure one drive with partitions for duplicate and versioned backups. Set up Time Machine (or another versioned backup app) and let it run; also create a bootable duplicate. Then disconnect the drive and repeat the entire procedure with a second drive. If you use Time Machine, you can configure multiple destination drives, and Time Machine switches between them automatically (see Choose a Destination).
If you use a Time Capsule, you can’t just swap out its internal drive whenever you feel like it (it’s a pain to do, and it voids the warranty). You can, however, keep your backups on an external USB drive connected to your Time Capsule and then swap that drive from time to time—perhaps reserving the internal drive for media sharing.
You may be wondering where exactly “offsite” could be in your case. Here are some suggestions:
Your place of work
A neighbor’s or relative’s home
A storage unit
A safe deposit box
Don’t keep an offsite backup in your car (or your garage!), which is, if anything, more susceptible to damage and theft than your home. Heat and cold extremes in your car can also hasten data corruption. If you want as much security as possible with a trade-off of less convenience, keep the drive in a safe deposit box at your local bank.
Taking care of your media is just as important as making proper backups in the first place. If your backup disk is lost or damaged, it does you no good. So whatever else you do, be sure to store your backup media in a cool, dry place away from significant sources of light, static electricity, vibration, and other hazards (such as inquisitive pets or children). This may seem obvious, but it pays to remember that you’re doing backups in the first place because your data is valuable—perhaps even irreplaceable.
Use a Cloud Backup Service
A second (or third) drive can be expensive, and all that swapping and relocating drives can be a hassle. A different approach is to store your secondary backup online, using any of numerous cloud backup services that offer encrypted backups of large amounts of data at reasonable prices. The idea behind cloud backup services is simple: using either a conventional backup app or proprietary software, perform backups as usual, but use secure internet file servers—rather than local or network volumes—as the destination.
To oversimplify matters, I think of cloud backup services as falling into two main categories: self-contained (meaning they supply their own software) and BYOS (bring your own software). These are my own, rather arbitrary labels, but I think they provide a useful way of slicing up the landscape.
Self-Contained Cloud Backup Services
Oodles of online services offer backups for Mac users; see the online appendixes and my Wirecutter article The Best Online Cloud Backup Service. Some of the most popular services are:
Acronis True Image: Acronis True Image has a respectable set of features for storing versioned backups either on local drives or to the company’s proprietary cloud storage. You can pay $49.99 for a one-time purchase that includes no cloud storage; $49.99 per year for a plan that includes 250 GB of storage; or $99.99 per year for a plan that includes 1 TB of storage. (Multi-user licenses and additional storage are also available and are quite reasonably priced.) Among many other features, Acronis can back up your Facebook posts, store a copy of your entire disk in the cloud, and even restore an entire disk to a bootable state from a cloud backup. The catch is that this requires transferring more data than most home broadband connections can handle in any reasonable period of time. (And in any case, you can’t boot from your duplicate in the cloud; you must first restore it to a local disk.)
Backblaze: This service is my top pick, now that CrashPlan is off the table, and it’s what I use for my own family. Backblaze charges $5 per month or $50 per year (per computer) for unlimited data storage. Setup is almost trivially easy, and I’ve found it to be speedy and reliable. By default, Backblaze backs up all your important files without requiring configuration other than entering your email address. It excludes system files and items in your
/Applicationsfolder, among others. You can adjust what’s in and what’s out in System Preferences > Backblaze. To restore files, you can download them (individually or as a ZIP archive) from the web or have Backblaze mail you the files overnight on an external hard drive. (In fact, the restore-by-mail option is effectively free; if you send back the drive after restoring your data, Backblaze refunds the cost of the service.)Either way, a downside to Backblaze is that when restoring files, you must manually move them to where they belong; it won’t put them back in place automatically. Another potential downside for some users is that Backblaze’s backups (and restores) mingle files from all the different user accounts on your Mac; if it’s important to keep each user’s data strictly private, that might be an issue. In addition, Backblaze stores old versions and deleted files for only 30 days, which is shorter than I prefer. And it fails to back up or restore some Mac metadata (such as ownership and permissions, creation dates, and Finder tags). But it’s still, in my opinion, superior to the competition—and if ease of setup is your main consideration, Backblaze is the one to beat.
DollyDrive: DollyDrive, which I’ve also mentioned elsewhere in this book (see, for example, DollyDrive and DollyDrive Tips) is another app that includes options for both local and online storage; it also lets you sync files across devices and share files with other people. Monthly costs for unlimited Macs range from $5 for 500 GB of data to $25 for 2 TB, but there’s also a plan for unlimited storage from a single Mac for $6 per month, and discounts apply for one- and two-year subscriptions. Free seeding is also available.
IDrive: IDrive, the runner-up in my Wirecutter roundup, offers a maximum of only 2 TB of storage for backups (plus 2 TB more for file syncing), compared to Backblaze’s unlimited storage. It also costs a bit more ($69.50 per year, though with a discount for the first year). On the plus side, IDrive offers indefinite retention of deleted files (versus Backblaze’s 30 days) and up to 10 old versions of each file, supports network volumes as source or destination, and lets you seed your initial backup (by mailing in a hard drive) for free. It even has an app that runs on some NAS models, enabling you to back up their data to cloud storage. I offer considerably more detail about the service in my Wirecutter article.
Note: All these services offer compression, encryption, and delta encoding for efficient uploads and secure storage. They also offer iOS apps with which you can view and download backed-up files while away from your Mac.
BYOS (Bring Your Own Software) Internet Backups
The other category of internet backup services isn’t explicitly designed for backup at all; it’s just storage space that you can use in whatever way you want. To use it for backups, you must supply your own backup software, and in some cases additional software that enables your backup app to mount or otherwise interact with the storage space.
Although there are numerous services like this, I’ve chosen just a handful as examples:
Amazon Drive: Amazon’s consumer-oriented cloud storage service costs $59.99 per year for 1 TB of storage (a significant reduction from the unlimited storage it offered until mid-2017). Its performance doesn’t match some of the other options listed here, and given the reduced quota, the price is only average.
Amazon S3 and Glacier: Amazon.com’s S3, or Simple Storage Service, provides virtually limitless—yet modestly priced—online storage, complete with encrypted transfer. S3 charges separately for data storage (rates start at $0.023 per gigabyte per month for standard storage or $0.0125 per gigabyte per month for “infrequent access” storage, and vary depending on where the data is stored), data transfer ($0.09 per gigabyte downloaded after the first one), and requests, meaning operations that affect the data (prices vary depending on the request type; delete requests are free). Prices go down as volume goes up, and prices in Europe are slightly higher.
In any case, given Amazon’s pricing structure for S3 storage, if you keep more than about 218 GB of data online, other services are more economical. As it turns out, even Amazon now offers a cheaper service, called Glacier, with prices as low as $0.004 per gigabyte per month—but the catch is that because Glacier is intended for long-term storage, it can take several hours to access files when you want to restore them.
Regardless of whether you use S3 or Glacier, getting at Amazon’s online storage space requires both nontrivial setup and third-party software. The most popular tool to access your S3 or Glacier storage space from a Mac is Arq; see Arq (including the note there about similar apps) and Arq Tips.
Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage: B2 from Backblaze is storage only, without the backup app and service. The cost is a mere $0.005 per gigabyte per month (in other words, 1 TB for $5 per month), with the first 10 GB free. Because B2 is fairly new, only a few consumer-friendly Mac backups apps (such as Arq and Retrospect) support it so far, but more are surely on their way (and there are also command-line clients that work on the Mac).
Google Drive: Google Drive costs the same as Dropbox for 1 TB of storage ($9.99 per month), but you can also choose from among more tiers, with as little as 15 GB (free) to as much as 30 TB ($299.99 per month). Although you can use many tools to back up your data to Google Drive, Google offers its own Backup and Sync app that does exactly what its name suggests.
Google Storage Nearline and Coldline: Google’s answer to Amazon Glacier, Nearline costs slightly more at $0.01 per gigabyte per month but doesn’t make you wait hours to access your data. Coldline, meanwhile, costs only $0.007 per gigabyte per month but is designed for storage you don’t need to access frequently or quickly. Like Glacier, Nearline and Coldline require third-party software—and once again, Arq is the natural choice if you want to use this online storage space to back up your Mac (see Choose Another Versioned Backup App and Arq Tips).
Strongspace: This online storage provider offers several plans, starting with 15 GB for $3.99 per month, up to 200 GB for $18.99 per month. The service offers access via SFTP (supported by many Mac backup apps, although not by any of my favorites) or
rsync(accessible via Terminal); the company now provides its own free desktop software for Mac, too.Wasabi: A relative newcomer, Wasabi costs as little as $0.0039 per gigabyte per month (which translates to $3.99 per month for 1 TB), making it the least-expensive option currently available—just a hair less than Amazon Glacier—but with considerably better performance than even the standard S3 service. Because it uses the same API as S3, it’s compatible with any backup app that can use S3.
Before you settle on one of these providers (and especially before you start uploading terabytes of data), be sure to read the fine print of its terms of service carefully. Some of these services limit your upload rate (typically after you’ve uploaded a certain amount of data or a certain number of files), meaning it could take a surprisingly long time to back up and restore your data. Although price does not strictly correlate to performance, some of the less-expensive services yield slow effective transfer speeds that may significantly reduce their perceived value.
Cloud Backup Services: Pros and Cons
On the plus side, cloud backup services keep your files safely offsite with absolutely no effort on your part—and they do so for every backup you perform with your cloud backup software, not merely on a weekly (or “whenever I remember”) basis. They also encrypt your files and usually make their own redundant, offsite copies of your data. If you’re unable to conveniently store a set of backup media outside your home or office, an internet backup service can make that process painless. Even if you do maintain diligent offsite backups, an internet backup service can provide extra insurance for particularly important files.
Turning to the cons, these services are no substitute for duplicates; you’ll still have to maintain those locally yourself. And with cloud backups, the biggest issue is usually speed: even with a fast broadband connection, you could easily spend weeks doing an initial full upload of a moderately large disk, and of course restoring files may also be quite slow. So you may want to limit the files you back up online—perhaps only the contents of your home folder, or even just your ~/Documents folder. (Alternatively, choose a service such as DollyDrive or IDrive that lets you seed your initial backup by sending them an external hard drive.) Finally, you may need to think about monthly data caps and other restrictions your ISP may have on how you transfer data. Check with your ISP to confirm that using an online backup service won’t run afoul of their policies.
For all these reasons, most people should consider internet backup services as a supplement to conventional backup methods—a convenient way to get offsite storage—not as a replacement for local backup media.
As I said earlier, I use Backblaze for my family’s backups. It’s not perfect, and I do miss some features I formerly had in CrashPlan for Home, but all things considered I think Backblaze is the best choice for most people right now.