Unfortunately, relying on one backup is not the best backup plan. Especially if you lose your computer in a house fire, which happens to be the same location as your Time Capsule or Drobo. For that reason (and others), I use a couple cloud computing services as backups. The best way to protect your files is through using any of our best online backup solutions and we have made a further selection of the very best cloud backup for Mac.

1. How Do You Back-up Your Mac

You can do everything right, and still lose data. For instance, we have three external drives hooked up to the iMac that this story was written on, and still we lost work. That's because you need more than just some drives plugged in, you need a solid plan with contingencies. You need to think about it and then you need to do it. Have a plan for exactly how your data is backed up to external drives and precisely to where. What we've done on this Mac is have two of those drives as just extra storage space.

Only one of them was being used for backing up, and while we did have a plan, the plan wasn't good enough. The plan didn't survive our hitting a problem and needing to reconfigure everything. We assumed it was all still working as it had been and that's why we lost data. To be fair, it's not the greatest amount of data in the world ever.

It's a FileMaker Pro database and we've lost maybe seven entries in it. Then to be even fairer, the solution to preventing this loss really should be using and properly configuring a service like Backblaze. So, let's talk about it. And, how it's not enough just to subscribe —you've got to put some work into it. Perfect storm What's happened is that we're in the middle of moving to an external drive so that we can boot our iMac without using its creaking internal one. That's just a case of using and we've done that yet somehow we've convinced Backblaze.com that we're starting anew. It appears to be backing up all 3TB of data from our external drive even though 99 percent of it is the same as the internal one was.

It's not supposed to do that and we are having an email discussion with Backblaze about what's gone wrong —but you noticed that 99 percent figure. That's not quite the same as 100 percent. Last Friday, a FileMaker Pro database crashed on us —blame an elderly iMac —and we didn't notice at the time that it lost some data. Not much at all was lost, but enough that we turned to Backblaze to retrieve the latest version of it.

Except Backblaze hadn't gotten to that database yet. So we're out these seven entries in a database and we can't get them back. Don't do it to yourself In the short term, we're hoping that the Backblaze company will figure out the problem with our cloned drive setup. But, that's the part that's on us, and the lack of work we put into solving the problem in the first place.

We're hoping that it will recognize that the new external drive has the same data, or mostly so, as the old internal one. It won't get back this lost data but it will mean everything from now on is fine. If they sort this out, then every thing we create on this iMac from then on will be backed up to their online service. We've been doing this for the last four or five years and on the odd occasion we've needed to restore a file, it's been quick and easy. If they don't sort it out, then we won't be safely backed up until it completes uploading the 3TB. With this AppleInsider location's poor internet speed, that's a long time. Right now it's saying we'll have everything backed up in 1,117 days time.

Even the Backblaze support page that calculates this starts its message with the words 'Freak out.' There are options in Backblaze to speed it up a little but really it's down to that poor internet connection of ours.

While we hope yours is faster, it's still the case that your very first backup is going to take a while. Possibly a long while. Not three years, mind, that's just ridiculous. This is when we realize this iMac is so far from the internet that we would be quicker describing the data over the phone. Start now What happens with any online backup service is that first it copies up absolutely everything to its own servers.

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How Do You Back-up Your Mac

You can tell it to exclude certain files and it won't bother with macOS or your applications. Otherwise then, by default, if it's on a drive connected to your Mac, it gets uploaded. Once that's done, Backblaze works continually to backup everything you do, pretty much as you do it. That file you created this morning? It is a very good feeling to know that this is happening. Trust us, we had that very good feeling until about ten days ago.