If you use a laptop, either you’ll need to get into the habit of plugging a backup drive in, attach the backup drive to another Mac on your network, or tape the backup drive to the back of your laptop.

If you use a desktop, you can get a big SSD and tape it to the back of your display, where you’ll never have to look at it. Buy a drive that’s bigger than your Mac’s hard drive and attach it to your Mac regularly. Apple builds it into every Mac, and thanks to the arrival of APFS and changes in macOS Big Sur, it’s a lot less painful to use than it used to be. (It says automatic backups are off because I’m using TimeMachineEditor to schedule them.) Time Machine comes on every Mac, and all it needs is a big disk to back up to. It’s an important point that doesn’t get enough attention: you aren’t backing up enough.

Similar to my Drobo crash of early 2020, Antony’s use of Time Machine and Backblaze allowed him to get up and running with a minimum of pain. Fortunately, he was able to recover every one of his files thanks to various backup strategies. Last week my friend Antony lost nearly a week of productivity to a dead drive in his iMac. However much you’re backing up your Mac, you’re probably not backing it up enough. I’m looking out for your best interests here. And you’ll probably do it again this time, but I’ve got to try. I know you’ve heard it a million times before, so many times that you skim past it when you read it.

Crashplan vs backblaze 2020