Introduction

The first time I thought seriously about backups was right after I lost a valuable, irreplaceable piece of data—an email message sent to me by a celebrity—as the result of a disk crash. That was over 25 years ago, and ever since, I’ve practiced and preached diligent Mac backups. After all, Macs may be fantastic computers, but they’re still subject to electronic and mechanical failure, theft, human error, and many other problems that could cause anyone to lose data.

My first book about Mac backups was published in 2004. Back then, I found that many readers still needed convincing that hard drives were better for backups than CDs, that backups ought to run without manual intervention, and even that backups were worth the bother in the first place. When Apple introduced Time Machine as a built-in backup feature in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard in 2007, backups became easier to perform and harder to ignore. Although Time Machine isn’t the only way (or even, necessarily, the best way) to back up your Mac, it has done more to popularize the concept of Mac backups than anything that came before it, and it set a new standard for usability.

If you don’t back up your Mac at all, or if you do so only haphazardly, this book will help you over the initial hump of getting started with a solid backup plan. Having great backups no longer requires lots of money, time, or technical expertise. You can be up and running in a couple of hours, after which things will run mostly on their own, and the only time you’ll have to think about your backups is when it comes time to restore lost data—something you won’t have to fear anymore.

On the other hand, if you already have a backup system, it might be time for you to update it. Technology changes rapidly, and you could find that a different approach (or newer hardware, software, or cloud services) will serve your current needs better.

This book explains how to develop a solid backup strategy, what your hardware and software choices are, how to set everything up, what pitfalls you may encounter, and how to restore your data if disaster strikes. Rather than explore every alternative, I guide you gently but firmly into a fairly narrow set of options that should yield excellent results for the vast majority of Mac users.

Before we get started, I need to mention a few qualifications:

• This book is primarily for people who need to back up either a single Mac or a small network—not for system administrators who need to back up dozens or hundreds of machines. As a result, I say little about the high-end equipment and enterprise-grade software used for backing up large networks.

• I don’t cover command-line software such as cp or rsync. My goal is to make the process as simple as possible—ideally, without requiring you to know anything about Unix or using the Terminal utility to configure and interact with your backups.

• Although I provide basic guidance for performing backups with several popular apps, I can’t give you foolproof, step-by-step instructions for setting up every backup app you might use. But by the end of this book, you should have enough information to determine, with the help of your software’s documentation, the settings that will produce your desired outcome.

• Previous editions of this book covered operating systems all the way back to OS X 10.9 Mavericks, but since that’s now quite old—and extensive details for older versions made the book harder to read—I now include specific instructions only for macOS 10.14 Mojave and later, up to macOS 13 Ventura (although much of this material applies generally to Macs running older versions of macOS). Also, although I don’t cover Windows extensively, Back Up Windows Files and Volumes discusses backing up Windows when it’s running on your Mac.

• I’ve put certain information, like feature comparisons of Mac backup hardware and software, in online appendixes.