I know this has been discussed here a few times, but I’m still confused. More and more I find myself wanting to use iCloud. But to be 100% confident with it, I want to have a backup solution I can rely on. I have a MacBook Pro and my primary backup tools are a NAS Drobo and CrashPlan. I also use Time Machine through my Drobo.
Time Machine will not back up my iCloud Drive documents. (The iCloud Drive folder is either grayed out or kicks up an error when I select it in time machine). CrashPlan will not allow me to select my iCloud Drive to backup, and instead suggests I follow Apple’s recommendations and make a copy of everything in my iCloud folder and then back it up that way. I am trying to automate this, and this is a ridiculous workaround.
I want my documents in my iCloud folder to be backed up on both CrashPlan and my Drobo. But if I don’t automate this, it will not happen with the daily frequency I need. I’m blowing the dust off of Carbon Copy Cloner and that seems to do what I want, but I would like to know how you all have solved this problem.
The challenge I see with this solution is that the Drobo is not always mounted. I remember @katiefloyd mentioning an app that she used to auto mount NAS drives. Can someone remind me what that was? Also, I think I need to use something to always connect me to a specific network when I am home. Would Keyboard Maestro do the trick there? I have KM, but I’m not very experienced with it yet.
Why won’t Time Machine backup your iCloud Drive? I just checked my Time Machine and it seems to have my iCloud Drive files backed up just fine.
Wha… whatnow?
That may be the dumbest suggestion I’ve ever heard.
Trying to automate it is going be a giant pain in the ass, because although those folders all show up under “iCloud Drive” on your Mac, they’re actually being pulled in from other folders in ~/Library/Application Support/, so it’s not like you can just say "Ok, copy all of my files in ~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/ because that won’t get most of what you see in “iCloud Drive” in the Finder.
(I’m assuming you’re talking about trying to backup individual app folders, not something like your “Documents” and “Desktop” folders if you have them in iCloud.)
I would definitely recommend using SuperDuper or CCC to make sure you have a recent full-drive backup.
(Personally I’d probably dump CrashPlan and use Arq instead, but that may be more than you want to invest in switching if you already have CrashPlan set up.)
You can use Keyboard Maestro to mount your NAS drive when you connect to a specific Wi-Fi network… Usually by running an AppleScript command (usually the most reliable way I’ve found to mount a network drive).
Not sure what you mean by “I need to use something to always connect me to a specific network when I am home”? If there are Wi-Fi networks that you don’t want to join, can’t you just remove them from the list of “known” networks, so it will default to joining the one that you want? I assume that I’m missing some important detail here.
+1 on TJ’s post here. He wrote just about everything I would have.
@JKoopmans yest Mountain is a great little app. I picked it up on sale and it’s made mounting/unmounting very easy - I love the ability to group volumes so they can be mounted/unmounted with a single click.