Understanding the Difference Between Backing Up and Archiving

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's talk about the difference between backing up and archiving. 

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So recently a few people have asked me what the difference is between backing up and archiving. There is a fundamental difference and it's important you understand it.  So first what is a backup. A backup is a copy of all your data that's meant for emergencies. Everything is copied. Usually automatically and usually there's also a history so you'll be able to go back in time a day, or a week, or a month, and find the file that you accidentally deleted. The idea of a backup is to protect you from two things. One, a disaster where your computer is stolen or your hard drive crashes and you lose all your data you can restore everything from a backup. The other thing that it protects you from is an accident. That's when maybe you delete one file or a folder and then you want to restore that one because you made a mistake. 

An archive is fundamentally different from this. It's longterm storage. The idea here is that you have data, usually some files, that you don't need anymore or at least you're pretty sure you won't need them. But you don't want to delete them forever and they are taking up space on your hard drive. So the idea is to take them off your hard drive and put them somewhere else. Somewhere that you don't necessarily have everyday access to like an external drive that's sitting in a drawer but the file is there if you need it. Another way to think about it is a backup is a copy of your data but all your data is still on your drive. You just have a copy in the backup. An archive though is when you take a copy of a file and then you delete the original. The file isn't on your drive anymore but you know you've got it in this archive location. 

So in addition to a backup and an archive the other location is your primary storage usually your internal drive on your Mac although some people may have an internal drive and an external drive as primary storage for their Mac. Also, iCloud Drive is primary storage. It's syncing things between all your devices. So if you're using iCloud Drive then iCloud Drive and your Mac's local drive both comprise your primary storage. This is what everybody's got no matter what else you're doing. You've got primary storage. A diagram of your system may look like this then. You've got your primary storage on your computer and iCloud Drive and you've got a backup where files are always being backed up, usually with Time Machine, to a backup drive. Or you could have an online backup or some other type of backup. 

You also can have an archive that's another drive or set of drives and those are things where you manually move a file from your primary storage to the archive, removing it from primary storage. 

Typical backup solutions include Time Machine, which a majority of Mac users will use, but are third party alternatives to Time Machine as well. In addition you could have an online backup that you use. Archive solutions are almost always external drives. That's what most of us are using. That's what I use. You can get an external drive, connect it to your Mac, move the files there. But there are alternatives. If I was making this video ten years ago I'd definitely be talking about external media. Burning DVD's for instance and putting files on them. But CD's and DVD's don't really hold that much data. Macs don't come with optical drives anymore. It's just much cheaper for a per gigabyte to get an external drive and do this. 

Now there's also online storage. You can actually archive files to a drive online. This is different than iCloud Drive. This isn't actually syncing anything with your Mac. This is someplace that you would open up inside of an app, like a FTP app, transfer files to this external storage. This is still pretty rare now if you're outside of a corporation that has a setup like this. But I think it's going to be more and more common. As I mentioned before iCloud, iCloud is neither a backup nor an archive. It is primary storage. If you're using iCloud Drive, this is your primary storage where your files are. 

So one question I would get asked about this is when do I archive files. So the thing you have to ask yourself is will you need this file. If the answer is yes you're going to need this file at some point in the future, then No, don't archive it. That file needs to be kept on primary storage. Even if the answer is you'll probably need it or there's a good chance that you'll need the file, then No that file should remain in your primary storage on your Mac and it shouldn't be archived. Only if you are probably not going to need it in the future should you then archive it. Archiving is basically a way to delete the file, get rid of it, but not permanently. If for some reason you need to go back in your records and look at a file then you can go to your archive. But chances are you won't need things. If you have 100,000 files stored in an archive maybe over the next few years you may need a handful of them. You don't know which one you'll need so you archive all of those files. 

An example for me maybe an app that I developed years ago and the app is no longer one that I have in the store. I don't want to delete the store's files for that project. So what I'll do is I'll archive them, save all the space on my hard drive, and chances are I'll never need it again. Maybe there's a chance that I might want to access a graphic or maybe a function or library or something that I created in that app and use it in a new app. Probably not and if I didn't have that project available anywhere it wouldn't be a huge deal. I also archive the old source material for these videos that I make. But chances are a video I made ten years ago I'm not going to need any of those source materials from it. If I want to make a video like that again I'm not going to want ten year old screen captures. But I put that on an archive so I do have a copy of it. It's not taking up space on my primary storage. It's just in a drawer or closet on a drive somewhere. 

Now a problem arises if you don't have enough primary storage space. I said before that if you think you may need the file again you should keep it in primary storage. But what if you're out of space. One of the things I'll tell you if you're out of space on your Mac is to archive files you don't think you'll need anymore. But what if you've done that and you still have too much stuff on your internal drive. Well you may need to move the line a bit and instead of archiving things that you're pretty sure you don't need anymore, move it up to things you're relatively sure you won't need anymore. This is unfortunate and it's a sign that you need more space either in iCloud Drive or on your next Mac you need a bigger internal drive. But if you're stuck in a situation where you can't change that right now, you're not ready to get a new Mac, then you've got to go and move that line a bit and archive things that have a higher chance of you needing again. It's going to be a judgement call for you and it's not an ideal situation. You don't want to be archiving things that you think you may need again. But if you're out of space, archiving is a solution.

The best practice is to have a backup going with Time Machine. So you want an external drive and you have a Time Machine backup going into that external drive. Then you have another external drive and you use that for archiving. So that would be removing things from your primary storage and moving it so the only copy is on the archive. But I'm often asked, well what about backing up the archive. Well, you have to consider whether a backup of your archive is necessary. Could you stand to lose everything that's on your archive. Hopefully the answer is yes and that's true in my case. All the stuff in my archive I could lose and it wouldn't be the end of the world. But it would be nice to have a backup so you don't lose it. You have to judge for yourself whether or not you need to backup your archive. One way to do that would be to use backup software and actually make a copy of your archive every once in awhile so you have a second identical copy of your archive. So maybe two matching drives. Another way to do it is to simply have a second archive. So you've got archive A and archive B and whenever you archive files you just put a copy on both drives. You can certainly go with a multi-tiered solution as well where you have all your primary storage, with all your current files and things that are important. Maybe you have secondary storage that like an external drive that's always attached to your Mac because the internal drive isn't bit enough to contain all that stuff. This is all part of your primary storage. Then maybe you have multiple levels of archiving. Maybe you have an archive of important things like financial records that you want to make sure you have copies forever so you're going to want to back those up. But then maybe you have a deep archive of things that aren't really that important that you could stand to lose but you don't want to completely delete right now. Those maybe you just have one copy of them archived and you don't worry about backing them up.

So there's no one size fits all solutions. You've got to go and look at how you use your Mac, what you use it for, and come up with an archiving solution that fits your needs.