How to Backup Your Mac and Keep It Secure

Computers, like life, shit happens. And when it does, it’s comforting to know that your precious photos, work documents, tax returns, etc are safely backed up. John Siracusa mentioned this in his OS X 10.5 Leopard review.

Apple surveyed its customers’ backup habits prior to creating Time Machine. 80% of Mac users acknowledged the importance of backing up their data. (This is alarming; only 80%?) 26% reported actually backing up their data. This may not seem too bad until you consider the next question. Only four percent backup regularly. In summary, if one could magically make a Mac user’s main hard drive vanish, there is a 96% likelihood that countless files would be irretrievably lost.

Time Machine: The Easiest Way to Backup

OS X includes a backup utility called Time Machine. It’s an app that copies everything from your Mac to an external hard drive. Just Switched to a Mac? Get our eBook – The Ultimate Guide to OS X Yosemite for a Mac Beginner. It is perfect for people who want to get the most out of a Mac. For new Mac users, Time Machine is a great place to start. Get a cheap external drive that’s double the size of your Mac’s storage. Connect it to your Mac once a day or on the weekend. Time Machine will backup system files, applications, photos, videos, music, everything.

If you keep an external hard drive connected to your Mac, Time Machine can perform backups every hour. It also does weekly and monthly snapshot backups.

The backups are time-based, so you can recover a file you’re working on or a file that got deleted from the Time Machine backup. It will show you all the different versions and timestamps.

Time Machine saves multiple versions of the same file, so the backups can become heavy. It will keep backing up data until your drive is full. By default, Time Machine deletes the oldest backups when there’s no space left.

How to Setup Time Machine Backups

Open the Time Machine app and switch it on.

The app will ask you to choose the backup disk. You can choose an external hard drive or an internal partition. But beware, backing up your Mac inside your Mac is useless because if your Mac’s hard drive fails, you will lose everything, including the install and backup partitions.

Once you’ve selected the external hard drive, Time Machine will begin copying all the files. The duration of this process depends on the storage size and the type of drive you have, ranging from a few hours to a few days. Don’t worry, though, subsequent backups will be much faster.

The Offshore Backup Policy

The perfect backup policy includes on-site backup every day/weekend, off-site backup to a cloud storage, and backup of the said off-site backup on a different cloud/local server.

Your backup policy depends on the type of data and work you do, as well as the backups you make. Will you use encrypted or non-encrypted backups? Will you backup using Google’s servers or choose a more privacy-focused option like SpiderOak?

While photo/video auto-upload is more prominent on mobile apps, the Dropbox Mac app also allows for automatic uploading of new photos and videos on your Mac. This can be done when connecting your phone, camera, or SD card.

“The Cloud” remains a mystery to many. To provide clarity, we have compared Dropbox and Google Drive to the privacy and security-focused SpiderOak.

We have also discussed 8 mobile apps that automatically upload all camera photos. If you prefer not to involve third-party servers but still want your data backed up on multiple computers, BitTorrent Sync is a viable alternative.

Photos taken with professional cameras can be heavy – about 10 MB each. Dropbox offers 2 GB of free storage for new customers. You can upgrade to the $9.99/month plan for 1 TB of storage. This is enough for all your important documents, photos, videos, and more. Dropbox storage can be encrypted and supports 2-factor authentication.

Manual Cloud Backup is What You’re Looking For

Dropbox and Google Drive create folders on your OS X storage. Whatever you drop here is automatically synced to their servers. That’s how simple it is. Dropbox’s 2 GB free tier might seem small, but they run promotions all the time and you can get more free storage quickly. Google gives a generous 15 GB of free cloud storage, but it is divided between all the Google services you use, including Gmail.

If you’re in need of a Time Machine backup service for the cloud, we have two recommendations.

Backblaze and CrashPlan are similar services that back up everything on your Mac, including apps and files, to their servers. They offer unlimited backup for a monthly fee: $5 for Backblaze and $4 for CrashPlan.

And this is truly “unlimited”. You can backup as many file versions as you want and these services won’t delete old backups when their disks are full.

Restoring files from these services is easy. The experience depends on your internet connection speed since you’re dealing with gigabytes (or terabytes) of data to upload and download.

Of the two, Backblaze is our favorite. This is partly due to its regularly updated and feature-rich mobile apps that make it easy to access backed-up files without having to start up your Mac. Additionally, Backblaze is made by ex-Apple employees, so it’s safe to say they know their stuff when it comes to Mac apps.

Do You Need to Buy Antivirus for Your Mac?

Macs don’t get infected by viruses like Windows. Apple keeps system and app files hidden from users. This applies to web browsers and apps too. Each app runs in its own environment, limiting the impact of any virus, malware, or spyware to just that app.

Less malware exists for Macs, but even there we see limited effectiveness across tools. For example, in a recent test by Thomas Reed, the best Mac malware tool detected only 90% of the known malware samples used. This is a poor showing — we only see dozens of Mac malware variants per year, compared to 65,000 per day for Windows.

Despite Flashback being used as a call to arms to encourage people to adopt antivirus tools, most of those tools failed to detect Flashback for weeks — until it was highly publicized.

Looking at the numbers, fewer viruses/malware/spyware are deployed on Mac compared to Windows. And even when a virus does show up, antivirus apps are slow at updating their own repositories.

This kind of makes the whole antivirus software argument redundant.

OS X has the Gatekeeper feature that only allows installation of apps from the Mac App Store. We disabled this feature earlier in the guide. Living solely on Mac App Store apps may seem foolish, but instead of turning the feature off completely, choose the “Mac App Store and identified developers” option.

Apps from the Mac App Store undergo rigorous auditing by Apple, so the likelihood of them containing any viruses is practically zero.

Another factor is your browsing habits. If you avoid downloading from sketchy websites or pirating content, the risk of your Mac being infected will decrease significantly.

Additionally, using a VPN when connected to an unprotected Wi-Fi network will be helpful.

Enabling strong Firewall settings will also provide protection.

Switched to a Mac? Get our eBook – The Ultimate Guide to OS X Yosemite for a Mac Beginner. It is perfect for people who want to get a hang of a Mac and how to get the most out of it.

Yosemite enables FireVault disk encryption by default, so if you get hacked, the chances of someone stealing data off your machine are not high.

To conclude, antivirus is not necessary on a Mac. More important is browsing safely, not downloading shady content, using VPN when connecting to an unknown/unprotected Wi-Fi network, and keeping your Mac updated.