The BEST Backup Solution for Mac

today I'm gonna be teaching you all my favorite backup solution for Mac owners because as we all know technology does change quickly and the best backup solution for you five years ago might not be your best solution today ultimately the perfect backup solution would be one that could withstand any kind of disaster so that if every electronic in your home were destroyed you'd still have a way to get back your data how to backup your Mac coming up next on Tech Talk America back in the day we used to just tell everyone across the board to use time machine for those of you who don't know time machine is a piece of software that comes pre-installed into every Apple computer ultimately through this class I am gonna end up teaching you how to use it but the big thing that we didn't like about time machine was that first of all for those of you who backed up to an external hard drive those hard drives were still susceptible to physical destruction so for example if you had something like a fire or a flood or an earthquake your backup and your primary computer could easily both be destroyed and of course the other big problem with time machine is that you have to remember to plug it in this is something that's usually not quite as big a problem for a desktop owner since it tends to live on a desk but for those of you who are laptop owners typically it's not the best solution so my recommendation is that you use iCloud as your primary backup and Time Machine as your secondary backup in order to show you how to set this up let's switch over to my Mac alright folks let's start off with going over the settings to make this all happen automatically let's start off by going to the Apple menu at the top left corner of your screen and then from there we're going to go into system preferences now from here we're gonna go into iCloud settings from here you'll notice that I have a checkbox next to where it says iCloud drive and now let's click on options just to the right of that there's two key items I want to point out in this list the first is this top option right here which by default is probably not checked on your computer but I'm recommending that you might want to consider it so what this is going to do is it's going to take any files or folders that are on my desktop or in My Documents folder and it's going to move them into iCloud there's still a copy on my computer so for example if I do decide to backup my computer additionally with Time Machine Time Machine will also backup those files too this is just an easy way to make sure that no matter what computer I'm on or for that matter even what mobile device I'm on I always have the same data on all of them at least when it comes to those two locations in fact some of you may have noticed here in the background I actually have a folder that is showing from my other computer I have next to my recording computer here a laptop signed into the same iCloud account I just now created a folder and boom it's now here on my desktop I did want to make a quick special note for any of you out there who are video editors that if you do decide to use this feature here just make sure any projects that you are currently working on are not located on either your desktop or your Documents folder just because if you're editing a video and that location is stored to a place that's trying to sink through the cloud it's going to pretty much paralyze your internet connection so just consider moving it to maybe the movies folder or really any location other than these two places the other feature that I want to point out here is this last option to optimize your Mac's storage this is a great feature especially for any of you out there who are running low on hard drive space if you don't see that feature appear it's probably because you're running an older operating system but just know that it will be there in the future when you do eventually upgrade one of the situations where this will be especially helpful to many of you is when it comes time to purchasing a new Apple computer if you just simply use this feature on your old computer and store all of your most important data either on the desktop or in the Documents folder it means that when you buy your new computer all you really need to do is sign into your iCloud account and all of your stuff comes right back down one of the tricks I wanted to make sure I mentioned in this class was if you ever have questions about is my data in the cloud or is it not in the cloud the easiest way to find the answer to that is just to simply open whatever web browser you use and go to icloud.com you can sign in with the same information through the web and you should see that everything matches so for example if I go here into iCloud Drive again through the web you'll see here that if I go into my Desktop folder we have the folder from the other computer so I know that everything is syncing correctly now that we've talked about using iCloud drive to backup your files let's talk about using iCloud to backup your photos as you'll notice here once again we have an option button just to the right where it says photos and from here my recommendation is that you use this first option these next two may not be for everyone but of course there will be exceptions to the rule the one that we really care about more than anything though is iCloud for your photo library there's one additional setting that I want to show you but that setting is actually located inside the Photos app so for now let's click done and let's go into the Photos app for a moment from here let's go to where it says photos at the very top left and lets go into preferences the second tab that you'll see here is for iCloud and once again we have an option right here with one click to optimize your data one piece of advice I wanted to give you is that if you decide to turn on this option I would recommend that when you close this little box that you leave the Photos app open in the background for a couple of hours that just allows the computer to do everything that it's doing in the background complete and sync those changes to the cloud coming back to the iCloud preference pane you'll notice that there are other types of items that you can sink through iCloud like your contacts your calendars reminders etc in general I tend to recommend that my clients use all of these options although there are certainly exceptions to the rule in fact the only one that I really recommend you not use is keychain now different people have different feelings on this topic but for me it comes down to this keychain is one of the only apps that has literally never been updated by Apple it is incredibly hard to navigate and if you are trying to find your usernames and passwords to various websites that you use I would recommend that you use a different option in fact I actually just taught an entire class all about it it's called LastPass it's an app that you can put on your iPhone on your computer really any devices and if you want you can even print out your passwords if you feel like it let's now take a minute to talk again about time machine now I think it's pretty important for everyone out there to use time machine to back up their computer and while a lot of you out there probably have hard drives similar to this I want to throw an alternative idea your way and I admit this is not a solution for everyone especially anyone out there with big data needs but you might want to consider checking one of these out and if you do decide you want to pick one out the links are in the description of the video so these are both examples of flash drives one made by Samsung the other made by SanDisk and what I like about using a flash drive as a backup solution is that if you think about it if you had to evacuate your home this is easy enough to throw in your pocket and if your pocket gets wet don't worry about it they're waterproof in fact I've shared this story before but I'm once at a flash drive that I accidentally dropped in a puddle that puddle then froze and then two weeks later I got it back got all my data no problem at all these things are practically indestructible I think I paid about 60 or so dollars for each of these and these are the higher capacity ones so whether you decide to backup time machine to a flash drive or reaches off-camera an external hard drive I'm going to show you at this point how to set that up so that it works with your computer let's once again go back to my Mac one important disclaimer before proceeding in the process of formatting your external hard drive or flash drive this is going to wipe out any data that is already on that device as you can see here I have plugged my C gate external drive into my computer now from here I'm gonna click into spotlight here at the top right corner of my screen and just type in the word disk disk1 here double-click on Disk Utility from here click on the external hard drive that you've plugged in and then go to the erase button that you see here at the top center of the window before we go renaming the external hard drive the first thing I want to talk a little bit about is format now the one that you really need to use for time machine is this one right here Mac OS extended journaled from here you can rename your external hard drive whatever you want and then click erase this process usually only takes a few seconds if it does fail and I have seen this happen before for whatever reason usually if I run it twice it tends to go through the second time now as you will see here as soon as it finished formatting the drive it immediately saw that there was no backup hard drive associated with this computer and so now it is saying with one click I can use this as my backup disk if for whatever reason you do not see this you can find the same option through System Preferences so let me show you that real quickly just go up here to the Apple icon at the top left System Preferences and then down here towards the bottom right are your time machine options so from here you would click where it says select backup disk and point it towards your backup hard drive now for those of you out there who find the time machine tends to slow you down a little bit there is a simple free application that you can download called time machine editor and I'll give you a link to it in the description of this video like I said it's totally free but for those of you who don't want your computer to back up every hour maybe you just want it to backup once or twice a day it might be a really great option just as far as freeing up resources and making that not happen quite so often thank you so much for watching everyone keep in mind if you would ever like to take a private lesson with yours truly it's something I really do enjoy doing it's a great chance for me to get to meet and connect with all of you and help you whatever issues you might be having you can find out all the information on my website at Tech Talk America comm slash private lessons that's all for me everyone thanks for watching so much this is david a cox with tech talk america class dismissed

Channel: Tech Talk America

Views: 337,086

Keywords: macbook air, macbook pro, imac, imac pro, backup, time machine, time machine mac, backup data, backup solution, sandisk, samsung flash, seagate, mac mini, time machine editor, macbook, mac os, mac time machine, mac backup, how to backup mac, time machine backup, apple time machine, david cox, tech talk america, tech talk, apple, how to backup your mac, mac pro, tutorial, mac, macos, how to use time machine, backup mac, icloud, hard drive, daivd a. cox

Id: ksYYE7TfPBw

Length: 11min 29sec (689 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 11 2018