Keep Your Files Safe & Sound

Start your backup plan today to keep your data safe.Nate Drake explores the different storage options for keeping your files secure

- Nate Drake

Losing precious files is absolutely heart wrenching – but it’s also totally avoidable. There’s a variety of ways to back up your data and keep your all-important data secure. High capacity external hard drives are available inexpensively online and from most retail stores. Huge leaps in available bandwidth also allow you to store more and more data in “the cloud,” synchronizing local copies of your information over the internet.

Apple in particular has gone to great lengths to make it easy for users to keep their data safe. macOS’s built-in backup utility, Time Machine, can easily copy data regularly to external drives, and iCloud Drive can store folders such as Desktop and Documents online, too.

Nevertheless, it usually takes a cataclysmic data loss for people to start implementing a regular backup plan, by which time it’s often extremely difficult to recover lost data. Take a moment to consider the data already on your computer and how you would be impacted, and what you would do, if that data were lost.

In this guide, we explore a number of ways to back up your most precious information. Some can be done inexpensively while others are more costly. We encourage you to read through these carefully and decide which is right for you. Above all, remember that you can never have too many backups!

iCloud Drive

Store your most important data in Apple’s online storage

WHEN A DEVICE is signed in to iCloud using your Apple ID, certain data, such as calendars and contacts, is kept in sync between the device and Apple’s servers. You can use this to keep data consistent across all your devices. With the advent of iCloud Drive, you can store files in a similar way.