Thoughts on having partitions? I’ll check out that drive for sure
Far more knowledgeable people than little old me here but could you just change the password to Backblaze? But that assumes that that password doesn’t somehow get back to that computer if it’s completely accessible but I’m not sure how that would happen.
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I’m way behind most people here, but the episode was the final kick I needed to buy more iCloud storage so my iPhone and IPAD Pro finally had enough space to do backups over WiFi. I used to back up on my MacBook but that was always a chore. Some great content this week.
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Backblaze has a feature to help Find Your Lost Computer but curiously they do not give clear instructions on what to do if your computer is stolen.
If you change your password and your stolen computer remains connected to your account, then it would seem like the thief could change files that end up overwriting your backups.
If you change your password and your stolen computer gets disconnected, then the “Find Your Lost Computer” feature would presumably stop working.
(All of this is theoretical, of course. The most likely thing that a thief would try to do is wipe the computer so they can sell it. It’s unlikely they’d care enough to try to mess with your files.)
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Okay, potential real-world recover question, inspired by this episode:
Currently my 2018 Mac Mini is at Apple, with a potential drive replacement imminent. If that happens, I have to decide what to do. My backup has been backblaze backing up the drive, and I am almost positive it’s solid. But also, any document of note is either in Dropbox or iCloud Drive.
So, assuming the worst happens, I’m wondering… do I:
- Order a Backblaze backup drive (time and $$$) and just restore the drive to the last saved point, or
- Just build as a new machine, logging into iCloud and Dropbox, and then reinstalling a bunch of software and preferences.
What would you do?
If you’re sure that all of your data is in Dropbox and iCloud, I’d probably just reinstall everything from scratch and restore the documents from the cloud. But I tend to do a fresh install on each machine every few years anyway.
Thank you very much. This is helpful.
That’s exactly my thinking. Although I will not have new devices this time, I will install all mine as new…
waiting for the headache to hit
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Me too, same reasoning as you.
Having a drive shipped shouldn’t be too expensive. You get a refund of $189 when they receive the drive back. You’re only out shipping.
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iMazing has been kind of flaky for me, and I don’t trust it. They recommend (pretty much mandate) that iTunes Sync be turned off. I don’t like that. I also just tried reinstalling, and it went into an infinite loop complaining about the library disk not being available, with no way to exit and change whatever preferences might be wrong. So I deleted it again.
There seems to be a dichotomy in philosophy between iOS backups and macOS backups.
The thinking seems to be, an iCloud backup (which isn’t really a backup, but more a sync/copy) is fine for iOS devices, but for macOS, a copy of data on iCloud (Dropbox, etc.) is insufficient.
To have a true iOS backup, we need some sort of chronology, so we can go back in time and restore the thing we deleted and that the deletion was already synced to the cloud. I know iCloud provides some 30-day history, but this is also judged insufficient for macOS.
This has the potential to become a greater issue now that more and more people are going iPad only, and doing serious work on iOS devices, rather than just consuming media.
To this end, I tried iMazing again, but it lost its mind, so I deleted it (again).
I guess the other alternative is archiving backups in iTunes on macOS of iOS devices.
What do you all think?
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Now that we have external storage support (at some extent) it would be nice to have an option to backup or even clone an iOS device to an external disk… It would make a lot of sense.
I guess it might need a lot of work to develop a “time machine for iOS” (whether it’s made by Apple or by an external developer), not only to get the data onto the disk but to create a restore system too.
And it might create a lot of sandboxing / security issues having a bootable/recoverable clone of an iPhone or iPad (similar to those present in the Mac ecosystem, anyway).
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So I tried Backblaze, and I quickly found that it’s unlikely to be optimal for my needs, because I only want to back up specific directories, while Backblaze backs up everything by default and makes you exclude specific directories. This is a feature of Backblaze (https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217665468-Why-can-t-I-pick-files-folders-to-backup-), but the lack of flexibility is odd.
Context: I use iCloud Drive, and symlink the directory to my data directory on a separate partition, for ease of access. However:
- The physical location of the iCloud Drive directory is
/Users/<user_name>/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/(with variations for app folders) - I don’t want to back up the other (system) files inside the Library
- Excluding the
/Usersdirectory will exclude iCloud Drive, even if it is symlinked elsewhere.
Looks like I’ll need to look for a cloud backup solution that lets you choose specific directories.
A strange dichotomy indeed! This also reminds me of why I’ve always been reticent to shell out for Backblaze: Dropbox, iCloud Drive and Backblaze all provide a 30-day history (which, incidentally, seems to blur the lines between cloud backup and cloud sync).
For example, suppose I use:
- Time Machine (which has theoretically infinite history on a local drive, albeit with a specific and unchangeable backup frequency); and
- Dropbox/iCloud Drive (which has a 30-day history).
Then if I choose not to use a cloud backup service with infinite history, and a catastrophic event occurs that destroys my primary machine and my time machine backup, then I still have a 30-day history of my files using the cloud sync service. Using Backblaze doesn’t change this.
You can backup everything for the same price, and with no extra effort. What does excluding everything do for you?
Yeah, I don’t have a counter argument, other than Backblaze is a complete backup, whereas with cloud sync, you have to be sure everything you want to keep is in the sync folder.
I can’t count the times one of my users came to me needing a file(s) that had been deleted months and occasionally years in the past.
There are ways to fully customize your cloud backup. I permanently backup my most important documents, with Arq and Amazon S3, at a cost of around $2/month. Less important files are backed up, by Arq, to other locations and are thinned much the same as Time Machine.
I suggest people choose their backup method based on the data they can’t afford to lose.
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Good question - I should have clarified. I have limitations on my internet plan, such that the difference between backing up merely my iCloud Drive directory (20GB) and my entire /User directory (50GB) is non-trivial.
Ah! That makes sense. Thanks for clarifying.
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