Dorchester — Mar 11th 2025

Mick talked us through the various ways of backing up on both Macs and iOS. He started with Time Machine , a Mac-only system, showing us how to set it up, selecting an external drive and an option about the timing between backups running from every hour to every week. The great feature of Time Machine is to be able to go back in time and retrieve documents, etc., from a previous time, which could be yesterday or even years ago given a large enough storage capacity. As the Time Machine disc storage gets filled, it will start to delete the oldest data to make way for new.

Mick then moved on to cloud storage, focusing on iCloud Drive and showing how this works as any other internal or external drive accessible via the Finder. The files on iCloud Drive are also accessible via the Files app on iOS devices, so they are the default backup for iOS, though Mick distinguishes between the standard syncing features of iCloud, such as Address Book, Calendar, etc. He showed how one can also access iCloud Drive as part of iCloud by logging into iCloud.com, which, when asked for a password, is asking for the device password or code if not using fingerprint or facial recognition by default, this rather than the Apple ID password. On the iCloud website, it is also possible to restore a few days earlier copies of calendar, address books, and some other data.

Finally, Mick looked at making clones, which is literally making an exact copy of the hard drive or, more precisely, that volume on the hard drive that contains all your data, the OS being contained in a totally separate, inaccessible volume. Volumes contain hidden files that you cannot access, and simply copying the whole volume will not work, hence the need to clone. The two most popular cloning apps are Super Duper and Carbon Copy Cloner, both offering free basic use, but paying provides more options and flexibility, such as only re-cloning what has been changed since the previous clones.

Rick Churchill was finding his home system was getting physically very cluttered with various separate backup drives for Time Machine, videos, music, documents, etc., not least needing to share much of this data between his Mac and PC. He carried out a detailed analysis of his overall storage needs and the physical size of a NAS to fit where he wanted to locate it. He concluded that his present requirement is 4.5 TB. He opened up a QNAP 3-bay server (no sufficient physical space for a 4-bay server) using RAID 5 configuration. He showed the differences between RAIDs 1, 2, & 3. RAID 5 allows for storage spread across the drives in such a way that if one drive fails, no data is lost. With 3 x 4TB, Rick gets net 8TB of total storage. He could also install 2 SSDs to act as a cache for faster performance but has not found it necessary. He has the whole system working well with just the need to get a VPN connection working so he can access the server when away from his home network. Rick showed the various controls with a very easy interface, and files can simply be accessed via the Finder.

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