My use of my MacBook Air is changing. No longer is it my primary device. I create and edit all my content from documents to audio files to video files and more using apps on my iPad. My Mac isn’t often pressed into action any more. Would you still recommend Time Machine to be the best way to back up my documents and other user files? Wouldn’t this require downloading anything I create onto my Mac and then running Time Machine to back them up? It seems to me this is a bit cumbersome.
I do have everything set up to work and save my files on my iCloud Drive, and I have the iOS backup for all my iOS devices, (iPhone, iPad mini, iPad Pro), but as I seem to remember you have said before iCloud Drive is not an incremental backup and shouldn’t be relied on to replace Time Machine as a back up or archiving solution.
How can I most easily ensure all my files are backed up (and even archived)? Is there an iOS App I could use? Or, should I use Backblaze or something similar? I have manually been trying to save files to an SSD, but can’t easily work out how to create incremental copies without duplicating all my files.
Simply using the iOS backup if I understand it correctly is not going to be any good as it will not enable me to access specific documents – unless I have got it wrong?
Device: iPad
App: Something Else
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Julian
There is no good solution for backing up from iOS/iPadOS. Using iCloud is way better than nothing, but it is still easy to delete a file or change a file and then you don't have that incremental backup to fall back on. Some apps, like Pages, have versioning built in. But other apps do not.
This is just one of the ways in which using mobile devices is different from actual computers.
I don't have a good solution for you, sorry. I suppose having "Optimize" turned off on your Mac, and Time Machine backing everything up, would provide a good backup. But I'm not sure what you would do to get a better backup if you were to give up your Mac entirely.
thanks - I thought that might be the case.