Backing Up your Mac, iPad, and iPhone Class

0:00
Welcome to my class on backing up your Mac, iPad and iPhone. So the reason why well, before we get going with that, I got one slide that I always have to do. And it’s a little bit about me, this is for the people that are new to the class, this is my largest class yet, so pretty excited about that. But I’m just giving you a real short bio, of who I am, and should be coming up here. So I’m Dan Wah, sync, Owner, trainer, everything with dance tutorials.com. And basically, I have about 1600 videos on how to use the Mac, iPad and iPhone. I also host these classes every other week. And then I hold amas asked me things every other week, they alternate. And so the classes are based on a subject like what this is, and the AMA’s are more like, where you if you have a problem, and you try to figure out what’s going on, usually get through, you know, up to 10 questions within an hour, hour and a half. I have over 30 years publishing experience. And I’m also an apple, former Apple Genius about three years as an Apple Genius at our local Apple Store. And then I also help out at a local school, which has all Apple products, they have about 1600 MacBook Airs and iPads, distributed between the staff and all the students. So I help out with them probably about 10 hours a week or so with them. So that’s a little bit about me. And let’s get going to the class. Let’s get going to the good stuff. And yeah, we’ll start recording. It is recording. Okay, yep. So, alright. Just make sure, yep, it is recording. I don’t use the zoom to record I use my own software to record because then it just records me I don’t get the gallery view or anything like that. So I don’t have to edit everyone out and things like that. Going, this is going on YouTube live right now. So people could go to my site and watch this live, they’re not going to be able to chat. But they could watch it live. And then I can get a recording from YouTube as well, which is like a backup, which is great. So what we’re going to talk about here is backing up your Mac, iPad and iPhone. Now the reason why I kind of slipped this one in this isn’t wasn’t in my immediate radar. But last week, I had a frantic call from someone some of you know this. This is a friend of mine, a close friend of mine. And she was getting you know, hosting symposium, you know, like a for a week and a half or something every day she was doing some training and things like that. And she has about a MacBook Air that’s about eight years old. And I’ve talked with her about backing up before. So, you know, kind of gave her the guilt trip. You know why she should back up. So she was kind of doing that on a regular basis. And then she decided that she needed to she had to open up Microsoft Word Microsoft Word wouldn’t open. So then she updated her Mac OS, she didn’t have enough space on her computer. And lo and behold, her computer wouldn’t start up anymore. It was done. And it’s just because it didn’t have a lot of space. Your Mac even Windows, any computer. They love to have space, a little bit of breathing room. So she called me in a frantic, like, what do I do I have to give this symposium I need all my documents. I don’t know where they are. I’m like when’s the last time you backed up? And here it comes three months ago. And the reason is, is she has a MacBook Air and you have to plug in that MacBook Air. So everything was on there and she didn’t plug it in on a regular basis. They just moved. So lo and behold, boom, the ball dropped and so I tried to get her computer up and running wouldn’t work. And she’s just she she was frantic. I mean, we’re talking months of work just gone and she had to be there at 11 o’clock the next day. So the story ends well, she stored everything in iCloud desktop and then she used iCloud to, you know, for all of stored her desktop and documents which I’ll talk about

4:32
an iCloud so basically I was able to get on her phone through FaceTime. And she shared her screen with me and kind of guided her through it and we found all of her documents so then the files app within iCloud so all of a sudden, you know, it turned out to be great. I helped her order a new computer and she picked it up the next morning then the following evening. Got it all connected up with her iCloud account and all of a sudden, all of her documents just showed up on her computer. So the story ended very well. But it could have gone much worse. And she kind of I would go, she got lucky because she didn’t follow a good backup strategy. So that led me to, I think I need to cover this kind of thing. And also, when I started doing my AMA’s, you know, a lot of the questions in the beginning were backup related kind of things. It’s a very important thing. So I just thought, you know, maybe it’s time for a little session on backups. So that is, you know, the story behind why I am doing this. Now, let’s get into some of the good stuff. I’m gonna start out on the Mac, and then we’ll end up on the iPad and the iPhone, the iPad and the iPhone are much easier to manage your backups. Because they backup to the cloud. The Mac does not backup to the cloud. It backs up specific folders if you use iCloud. And that’s an if you use iCloud and if you have enough space in iCloud and this and the other. So there’s a lot of holes that you can fall into with the Mac. So we’re going to spend a little bit of time on the Mac. And then we’ll end up with the iPad and iPhone, because it’s just super easy on the iPad and iPhone, we have a few different options. And we can manage our backups and things like that. But it’s all done online, which is what I really like. So on the Mac, what we want to use is time machine, this is my favorite tool. And there are other tools that you can use, you can use super duper Carbon Copy Cloner. And they all have their, you know the the reasons why they you know, people would use them. But for general use, I am a huge fan of time machine because you don’t have to with carbon with those other tools, you kind of have to know, you don’t necessarily have to know what you’re doing. But you kind of have to know what you’re doing with them. Time Machine just works. It’s an apple thing, you know everything, they make it really, really easy. So I’m a big fan of time machine. So with time machine, like I say basically what it is, it’s an app that is installed on every Mac, and what you can do with it, just go to my Mac here. Hopefully

7:24
I’m on there. Here we go. Alright, so basically, what we have to do is we just have to plug in an external drive to our Mac, I mean, it can, I say can be that easy. And you can get you know, these, these new Solid State Drives, these are Samsung solid state drives. And these things are great. There’s no moving parts in them. I have also an older hard drive here, of course, not long enough, but you know, it’s one of the spinning ones. And you know, those things spin at, you know, 5400 rpm, and you know, there’s moving parts in there and they can break and they do break and they will break sooner, you know, eventually hard drives fail, you have much more. That’s right with these SSDs. They used to be expensive, they’re now relatively cheap. So if you can’t go with an SSD solid state drive, I would recommend that. So basically, all you have to do is just plug them in, plug it, plug in a hard drive to your Mac. And when you do, I’m going to plug in my hard drive to my Mac. So you’re gonna see it come up here on the side, eventually. Yep, it’s spinning up. i Can you hear it? Essentially, there it is. So this is my backup. Now right now it is not set up for Time Machine, what I would recommend doing when you plug in a hard drive is just go and name it. So you could call a time machine backup time machine one time machine two, you can use more than one backup, but just name it. And the reason why you want to name it is because you have to select it when you use it for a backup. So I’ll show you how easy it is first and then I’ll also show you you know if you have to format the drive, you know how you can do that. It’s not as scary as it sounds. But essentially, let’s just keep it real simple right now. This is how easy it is to you to set up a time machine on a Mac. I plug in the hard drive. And then I go over to my System Preferences. I have a cat that wants to jump on my lap here very up. They’re just running around. Okay, so I go into my System Preferences. We have time machine here. So it’s just part of your System Preferences. And then all I need to do is just go To select disk to disk, I can select all from all of the hard drives that are connected on my Mac. So I have one hard drive that is already set up.

10:12
This one is called backup. So now all I need to do is just select backup. That’s why I like to name them. So you can easily see which one it is. Otherwise, it could be Western Digital, or Samsung, or whatever, whatever the company names it. And so I select it. And then we go over to use disk. And pretty much that is it. Now, here’s being that I have a time machine already connected to my Mac, what it’s doing is it’s asking me do I want to replace this time machine? Or do I want to use both, I would recommend use both. There’s no no harm in using two different backups. The beauty of this is when one fails, you have another one. So this is why you want to may want to use depending on what information you have, you may want to use two different hard drives. So I’m going to use both, there’s really no no harm done in that. Now it is preparing it for backing up, it could be reformatting, it might be erasing it. So you want to make sure that you’re using a hard drive that you’re not using for anything else, it may erase it. And now what it is doing is it’s going to use it for backup. So you can see that the icon changed. It’s now a time machine icon. And this computer is now backing up to this harddrive. That’s how easy it is to connect up to, you know our views, use a hard drive to back it up, use plug it in, System Preferences, time machine. Now the catch to this is especially if you have a laptop, and I know a lot of us have laptops. The catch to this is you have to plug it in, this is what my friend found out. And I know how it works, you know you’re sitting on the couch or you know, you just you slowly get away from plugging in that external hard drive. If you have an iMac, there really shouldn’t be any reason why a hard drive is not plugged into that thing 24 hours a day. But if you have an external drive, you are obviously not going to plug it in on a regular basis. So what you want to do is make sure that you place that drive somewhere where you remember to plug it in, it could be by the couch, it could be in your office, it could be on a counter someplace where you know, if you’re reading the news in the morning, oh, I got a plug in my hard drive, you want to make a habit of that. How often does it back it up, it backs it up every hour. And it doesn’t backup the entire computer every time. So the first time it backs up, it needs to backup the entire computer. So that could take depending on how much stuff you have, that could take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. But after that, all it does is just backup. Anything that has changed. So it goes real quick. It’s all in the background, you don’t even know what’s going on, it just does it. So basically, this cat is going to knock something over here. It’s pretty adamant coming over here. So basically, all you have to do is just plug it in and Time Machine will see what is new and what is not new. And then just going back up what has changed and what is new. And that’s it, then it’s done it and typically what it will do is it will only take a couple of minutes for that to happen. Or is there this is what has been circling me. So basically, all you have to do is just plug it in, and then it’ll back up and it doesn’t take that long. So that’s how that’s how we can back it up nice and easy on the Mac. See what my next slide is here

14:08
Alright, so the next thing that we’re going to look at is how can you see if your Mac is backing up? And when was the last time it did backup. Now that we have a backing up, you know, let’s go and I gotta I gotta move this cat. She’s not gonna be happy. Okay, sorry about that. So the next time you know, you want you on make sure that it is backing up or we’ll see when the last time you did back it up. And that’s pretty easy to do. Basically, let’s go back over to my Mac here basically, mmm, there we go. I’m going to close this. What we need to do is we need to add time machine to our Menu Bar you’re going to see that time machine is here on my menu bar. Now the reason why I like to have have it in the menu bars. All I have to do is just click on this. And then I can see when it was last backup, I’m just going to skip the screen

15:18
Wow.

15:18
Dan, can I ask a question? Yes, you can.

15:22
Okay,

15:24
I do have a backup for the particular laptop I’ve been using but it’s been wiped a couple of times by

15:32
Apple. Okay so

15:56
same drivers it just smarter to get another drive and just backup.

16:00
No, you can put it on the same drive. I can’t I cannot tell you how many times I have erased These are from the school. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve erased these. And I can’t tell you why you can’t see my screen.

16:18
But events can I keep the old backup. What I want to do is keep the old backup and then just start from because it’s been months.

16:30
Then what you

16:33
had that’s why I’m thinking do I need a

16:35
general I would say get it I would say get a get a new. Okay, get a new one. Okay. Yeah,

16:43
thank you. Yeah, that was my suspicion.

16:45
Yeah, that’d be the that’d be the easiest way of doing it. Okay, I’m trying to find out why. Sorry, I’ve technical glitches once again.

16:59
They’re my Mac

17:05
we are that we do want that but I need it to be smaller

17:29
and we don’t need to have the iPhone

17:41
okay. You can see my screen Correct. Okay. I’m getting, I’m getting this close to order in M one Mac, I think I’m kind of hitting the limit with this thing with everything that I’m doing. So anyway. It’d be a MacBook Pro. But anyway, what, what you want to do is start over here, we go up to our Menu Bar, and you’re gonna see I have time machine up here in the in the menu bar. And when I click on it, what I’m able to do is see how long or when the last time it was backed up. So right now it is backing up. So it tells me it’s 53% Done. And it has 92 megabytes copied because this is a brand new backup, it’s taken a lot longer, right set up that backup initially. So I’m just going to skip this. Not going to back it up. And I’m going to show you how I added that to the menu bar. It used to be in there by default. But I think Apple kind of changed that. So basically, we just have to go to our System Preferences. And then we go over to time machine. And you’re gonna see an option to show the time machine in the menu bar, you want to make sure that that is turned on. I like to have that turned on for two reasons. Again, I can see when the last time it was backed up. So the last time this computer was backed up was 422 because I stopped backing it up if I want to go into time machine and I’ll save this more towards the end, but basically with time machine can really do two things, it can backup your entire computer. So then if something happens to your computer, that’s that’s the most stressful one. And the reason why you really want to have it is if you get a new computer or you get a new hard drive or you have to wipe out your hard drive. Basically what you can do is restore everything back into your computer. And there’s going to be everything from your backup. So it’s like you never left your computer. All of your applications are going to be there all your preferences are going to be there base Sick leads, it’s your computer, just from the last time was backed up. So if my friend, if we couldn’t have got all of her stuff, she didn’t have a backup from three months ago, I could have restored that backup to her computer, and everything would have worked, just everything would have been three months old. But it would have been like a snapshot from three months ago. So that’s why you always want to have the most current backup. So that’s number one, you can just restore the entire backup to a new computer or whatever. And that is pretty easy to do as well, when you buy a new computer. Essentially, what you what it’ll do is it’ll ask, Do you have a backup time machine backup? You say yes, you plug in your hard drive your time machine backup to your computer? And it’ll say which one do you want? You know, which which backup? You know, is it the one from an hour ago? Or do you want the one from yesterday, or do you want the one for three months ago, you can select which which time it is, and then it’ll just restore everything. Now that might take a couple hours. But eventually you’re gonna have your old computer right back, right back where it was, even though it might be a new computer, but you’re gonna have your old all your old stuff. So and the way that you, you can also use Migration Assistant to do that, if I open this up, every Mac has this, I just go continue. I’m not going to continue because it’s going to quit off my app. So I don’t want to do that. Because I don’t want to stop this thing. But basically what this will do is this is a migration, it’ll migrate your time machine backup over to this computer, you just follow the steps and it goes about five different steps with us. And then it’s done. So super, super simple. That’s why I love time machine. So I mentioned that another thing that you could do with time machine, where you can do is restore oops, go back. What you can do is you can restore files that you’ve accidentally deleted. So you can you can restore anything that that you had maybe a month ago, you’re working on a document, you deleted it or you want to restore that document the way that it was maybe you made some changes to it and you don’t like it. So you want to restore that will be in that time machine backs up everything, you can restore individual items. And again, that’s all done through the time shift menu. So this is I would say more of an emergency use as well. But you don’t have to restore the whole document, let’s say I threw something away, it’s in my documents folder, I threw it away. So all I have to do is just go into my time machine,

22:36
the screen is going to change here. And each one of these windows as a snapshot in time. Typically, it’d be an hour, because it backs up every hour. Now if my computer is off, it could be a day, it could be a month, you know, it all depends on how often your computer is on. But typically, each one of these little windows here is a snapshot. And what I’m able to do is restore something on there from a previous time machine. So right now I’m looking at my desktop folder. If I go back right now we’re looking at today, if I go back, just click on the arrow, I can go back and look at different times to see what I can restore. Let’s say I wanted something I don’t keep a lot of stuff on my desktop. But I do keep stuff in my documents folder. So all I have to do is just click on Documents. And there’s my Documents folder. So if I wanted to go back, let’s say this, that’s from this is from today at 422. I’m gonna go back further go today at 223. And I can also use this little grid here. So here’s yesterday at 557. I can just keep going back, we’ll go back to APR 10 was bring me back to APR 10. It’s loading up the documents from APR 10. And once it loads up those documents, all I have to do is just select the one that I want. And then I click on Restore. And what it’ll do is it’ll restore that document back into my Documents folder. So we can in addition to restoring the whole hard drive, we can also restore individual documents. And all we have to do is just select the folder, go to the date that we want, find what we want and then click on Restore. And that’s pretty much all there is to using time machine. I’m going to cancel here brings me back and close it back out and now I’m back at my at my computer today. So yeah.

24:53
Can you also do that with photos? I mean my biggest my biggest folder is photos.

25:01
Yep. You could, it depends on if you’re using iCloud. So without because iCloud, what it’ll do is it’ll store it in, in iCloud. Which means that it’s not going to be used in time machine. So it gets a little murkier with with iCloud. But But, yes, I could go to my time machine here.

25:30
And what you’re saying is I don’t need to do is it for

25:33
now? And really Yeah, with photos, what what photos does is if you store them in the cloud, you can, you can restore any photo up to 30 days, they keep a backup for up to 30 days. So if you throw something away, and then two weeks later, you’re like, Oh, I’d like to have that back. You can do that for up to 30 days. Then after that it’s gone. So it does that work a little bit different. Let’s

25:56
live photos as well. Yep.

26:00
I’ll talk about iCloud a little bit more on the difference between iCloud and, and backing up with time machine here shortly. Let’s talk about two here formatting a hard drive. This was a this was a common question that I had in my AMA’s. How do you format a hard drive to work with time machine. So let’s go back over to my Mac here. Choose the right one. errors. And basically all you have to do is go to your disk utility. And then you can format the drive Chris has seen me do this. So Disk Utility is an application that comes on every Mac. And what you can do with Disk Utility is basically erase hard drives. And once you erase the hard drive and format it, you can use it for whatever you want. So basically, what you need to do is go to your Applications folder. So I’m going to open up my Applications folder here. And in applications, every Mac has this, you’re going to see utilities. Now I’m using Mac OS Monterey. But if you’re using an older version of MacOS, you’ll see the same thing might look a little different. But Utilities folder has a Utilities folder. And in there, we have all these different utilities, one of them being Disk Utility. So I just double click on this to open it up, I’m going to close the window in the back. And from here, what it’s doing is it’s showing me all of my different hard drives. So I have this backup here, which is right here. So there’s another reason why I’d like to name them so I can easily see which one it is. I certainly don’t want to erase my Macintosh HD, I don’t think it will let me but you know, it’s not even something I want to try. Macintosh HD is your computer, that’s everything on it. So he certainly don’t want to erase that. So it’s always a good thing to just, you know, pay attention to the naming. So this is my backup. If I want to erase this, maybe I want to use it for time machine. And it has some stuff on there, I recommend that you use a hard drive. When you use a hard drive for Time Machine, only your time machine files are on it, you can I drive if I want. If I open this up, you’re gonna see, well, I stopped it but there’d be a time machine folder there. But you can put whatever you want on this drive. So then it will have your time machine and then it’ll have your extra files. But the problem with that is, if you’re using this for external storage, if this hard drive fails, not only will you use your lose your time machine backup, you still have your computer. So you know the whole idea with a time machine is to build redundancy. If your harddrive your external, your backup time machine fails, you have your Mac, go on, buy new, external hard drive, plug it in, start backing it up, your computer fails, you have your time machine backup, there are a mirror image of each other, you know, so basically everything, they should have the same information on it. But if you start putting files on here that are not on your Mac, if this drive were to fail, you would lose it because they’re not on your Mac. It’s not part of the Time Machine backup. So good thing to just keep keep in mind, use the Time Machine Backup only for backups. You can use it for other stuff but it’s not recommended. So now I want to erase this drive I want to use it might say I don’t need it anymore. I just need to erase it and use it for Time Machine. All I have to do is just select it and then I go over to erase.

29:57
I name it

29:59
and then you try format. So what are these formats? Well, not to get too far into it. But these formats here are basically how the Mac likes to see it. If you’re using an A newer Mac, and I’d say probably in the last five years, it’s using a PFS, if you’re using a Windows computer, it’s probably using while was using MS DOS, I think it’s exFAT. You know, you have your different different formats that that each computer uses. So if you had, if you had windows, you wouldn’t be using a PFS, you’d be using whatever they are, if you have Linux, you’d be using whatever they use. On Mac, they like to use a PFS. There’s also an older on called Mac OS Extended. But essentially all you have to do just go and use a PFS. That’s the new de facto standard. You can see I can’t even choose anything here, all I can do is just choose a PFS. And to keep it simple. Just choose a PFS we don’t have to encrypt it, we don’t want to use any case sensitive case sensitive means if you capitalize something that’s going to be different from one it is not capitalized. So let’s say I create a folder called dance tutorials. And then I create another folder called dance tutorials and I capitalize the D. If I were to use case sensitive, those would be two separate folders. And that can get very confusing. So really want to just leave that alone and just use apfs. Just keep it simple apfs if it was Mac OS Extended, I’d use Mac OS Extended, not encrypted, not anything else, just Mac just what it is. And then all I do is just click on erase. And it is erasing it doesn’t take that long. Sometimes you have to do this twice. But it doesn’t really matter. You’re erasing it anyway. So who you know, doesn’t matter if it if it doesn’t work the first time. And now that computer is erased, it is no longer being used for time machine because I erased it. So now what I need to do is go back over to my System Preferences. Go to Time Machine. i Where is it? Add and Remove. I go to backup here. And now it’s preparing that and it’s going to back it up. Now you’re going to see that I have two backups here. So I’m just going to erase I’m going to remove this one. I click on it, I’m going to remove the old one. Stop using this disk. And now it’s just going to use that one. Because it doesn’t know that I that I erased it. Yeah.

32:46
What is the mountain unmount.

32:49
So and disk Disk Utility, what you’re talking about there is. So if I go over here to backup, what I’m able to do is unmount this, and if I unmount it, you’re gonna see on Mount here, my computer, it will not show up on the desktop. So I’m just gonna go ahead and unmount it you’re gonna see it disappears. But it is still, my computer still sees it. It’s just not mounted. So you’ll see this every once in a while, if a hard drive goes bad, sometimes what you have to do is you have to mount it, it just becomes unmounted. So now I just go, I select it, and I go over to mount. And there it is. So that’s all you know, hopefully you don’t have to do that. If you have to start doing that it might be time to start thinking about another hard drive. That’s one of the signs that something’s going wrong, and might work. But it might not. So that’s that’s a flag, keep an eye on it. So

33:54
thank you. And I’m utterly confused. I started using Time Machine years and years ago. And there used to be a time I don’t know if it still exists, when it did not load download the entire files. After a while if there’s machines, if your harddrive starting to fill up, it only downloaded the last two weeks. I don’t understand whether that’s gone away, or whether it’s still exists as a limitation. And I don’t understand how that limitation works. So

34:28
yeah, so basically what’s happening there. So Time Machine keeps a backup, right? Pretty simple. And it’s a rolling backup. So I can go back an hour I can go back a day I can go back a week. Well how many of those backups does it keep? You know, it can’t keep them forever. And if I go into time machine here and I don’t have a lot of data because this is my demo computer but when I go into time machine here you’re gonna see I can go back all the way back to January of 2022. So I can go back what for or months on my real computer, not that this is not a real computer, I can go back a lot further. But it is limited by space. So it’s limited by how big your hard drive is your your time machine backup. So the way that it works is Time Machine up. For let’s see if I can find where that verbiage is. So you can see what I’m going to talk about. Here we go. Alright, so basically, what it does is it keeps an hourly backup for 24 hours. So the last 24 hours, I’m going to, you know, in theory, this was an iMac, it’s plugged in all the time, and I’m constantly working on it, I in theory, I should have 24 backups, one for every hour. But it can’t keep doing that because then it’s gonna get too too messy. So then what it does is it keeps a daily backup for the past month. So what I’m able to do is I’m able to go back to 8am, this morning, 9am this morning, or whatever time it backed up and the hour, but I can’t go to 8am Monday morning, all I can do is go to Monday. All I can do is go to Wednesday. So you it starts whittling it down, you can go into a specific time. So 24 hours, it keeps a backup every hour. Then after that it’s daily backups. And then after a month, what it does is it keeps weekly backups. So I could go back, if I go back to my January, I can go back to a specific week. I can’t go back to a specific day, I can only go back to a specific week. And eventually. What’s that done? Great. Is

36:46
it dumped the previous weeks? Yeah,

36:49
so that’s where that’s where I’m going. So basically, you know, you can see it’s just filling up slowly, slowly, slowly filling up and filling up. And depending on how old your time machine backup is, and then how much data you have. It’s eventually will fill up that hard drive. So then what does it do? Well, what it’s supposed to do is it’s going to delete the oldest backup. So let’s say that my hard drive starts getting full for, you know, it can keep about six months worth of data. And then that hard drive is full The Time Machine Backup is full. So what it has to do is it has to remove some of the old stuff to put on the new backup. So what it will do is it’ll remove the oldest backup, so it’ll remove it from six months ago. So I can have today’s backup in there. And then when it gets full again, it’ll remove the oldest backup. So that I’m glad you brought that up. Because I didn’t put this in my notes, you do not want to use time machine as an archive. And archive, as you know, as you can imagine, is something that keeps it forever. That’s not what time machine is, it’s truly a backup, and it’s not an archive system, it will delete stuff, exactly what you’re talking about. I’m running out of space, I’ve got to delete something. So it’s gonna go back and delete the oldest backup. Depending on how much you know, if it’s a smaller harddrive, that could be a month ago, if it’s a larger hard drive, it could be a year ago, it all depends on how big that harddrive is, and how much data you are backing up. So there’s a couple of variables in there. But he’s centrally you do not want to rely on time machine as an archive, because it will eventually delete

38:31
it. Does that apply to email as well?

38:36
Email works a little bit different. So let’s get into let’s get into cloud storage and the difference between, you know, time machine and cloud. So I mean, take a look at my notes here. A minute. I have next year.

39:01
Okay, so yeah, now we’re back in. So good. We’re right on schedule with with my with my thing. So online backups backing up online for offline backup. So we’re going to I’m going to split this into two. We’re going to just talk about online backups. And then we’re going to talk about cloud storage and email and things like that. So first, let’s go with online offline storage or online storage. I know it’s kind of confusing, but hopefully I can make it make sense. All right. So essentially, you know this, this is what we call offline backups. When we’re using time machine, it’s a local backup. If I backup my computer to my time machine, my Time Machine is literally one foot away from my computer. If something were to happen, my house were to get broken into. I had a fire here, you know something tragic happened. Both of these devices So there’s a potential that both of them are going to be damaged, gone, whatever it may be, which means I’ve lost all my data. So, offline backups like this, they’re great. But if you really have important stuff that you don’t want to lose, what you might want to do is go with online backup in addition to this, so I have my QuickBooks on my main computer. I backed that up online. So what does that mean? Well, essentially, what it’s doing is it’s backing up to a backup service. And I use Backblaze. But there are a number of them out there that that do the same thing. And with, I’ll show you a couple of screenshots because it’s on my main computer. So I took some screenshots here. Because I don’t use it on here. So once you install Backblaze, what it does is it adds it to your System Preferences. So if I were to go to and this is how I’m going to pick on Backblaze, because that’s what I use, but a lot of them work the same way. So in my System Preferences here, I have another preference pane down at the bottom here called Backblaze. So it’s just runs in the background much like time machine, so you can see it kind of very similar. But the key difference is instead of backing it up to a local hard drive, what it does is it backs it up to the cloud. So now if something tragic were to happen to my stuff, here, I had a fire at the house or something along that line, what I’m able to do is actually stuff from Backblaze. So I took a few screenshots here, so you can kind of see how it works. The first one here. So this is the preference pane for Backblaze. So as you can see, it’s pretty simple. I backup now, I click on restore options. I’ll show you what happens when you click on that shortly. And then I have my settings, you know, how often do I want it to back up, you know, how much bandwidth do I want it to use, you know, that kind of thing. So pretty simple, you just turn it on. And then here are a couple of the screenshots. So here are my settings. Basically, I set the name of the computer. So this is a 2019 MacBook Pro, I can also have it backup external hard drives that are connected to my Mac, which is awesome. So if I have an external drive connected to my Mac, not a time machine, but you can backup external drives, there’s no point in backing up a time machine because it’s the same thing as a time machine. It’s just in the cloud as opposed to local. So there’s no point in backing up a time machine. And then it alerts me when has not been been backed up for seven days. So I get a nice slower, I love that. We have performance. All right, I just leave it at automatic. Being that it’s backing up, you know, how much bandwidth is it going to use? Well, in the evening, I’d like to talk to us a little bit more like at one o’clock in the morning when I’m not using my computer. But obviously I don’t want it to do anything while I’m doing one of these webinars or classes. So I have it automatic throttle, I even want to step further. And I want to schedule here. And I say, start at 9pm actually switch that over to 1am. So then, you know if I’m doing something, do something for Alaska user group every once in a while, that’s at 11pm. So basically, it’s not, my computer’s not going to back up to Backblaze until 1am. I switch that over to 1am. But as you can see, it’s pretty simple. I can also exclude folders, maybe I don’t want to have a specific folder backed up. There’s no point in backing that up. Just check it and I won’t they won’t

43:50
click on the plus I’m sorry. And then it won’t back it up. And then the last thing here is we have reports and you can see if there’s any issues, what has been backed up things like that. So again, pretty simple. I think this cost like six or $7 a month. And then how do you restore it. So let’s say you wanted to restore some files, I can download them, all I have to do is go to backblaze.com. I log in with my account. And then I can select what files I want to back of what step files I want to restore, I have about 30 days again, it’s not an archive. So it’s just like time machine, it keeps just a snapshot, but it doesn’t keep a continuous archive. But if there’s a file that you threw away accidentally, you can go and retrieve that file, I just go to backblaze.com or whoever I’m using. All of them pretty much do this. And then I can go and download that file and I have it so just like time machine. I can also ask for a USB flash drive, maybe it’s a lot of files I don’t want to download and maybe you know it could be you know, 100 gigabytes worth of files. Well they’ll send you a flash drive, they do charge you for that. But you get to keep the flash drive. And let’s go with the extreme, my computer died, it was stolen, something happened, my Time Machine Backup failed or whatever, they will also send you a USB drive and that USB Drive has everything on it. So then what you can do is get a new Mac, and then you’re able to get all of your files, you’re not going to, you know, won’t restore like time machine, but you’re still going to have all of your files, you just have gone in the folder, drag them over. And it’s done. So this is great, what I call a I call Backblaze. An online backup services, insurance policies.

45:45
I hopefully include does it also include the applications?

45:53
My believe it does i That’s a good question. I don’t know. I don’t know. But most applications you get online now. So you can just read download them. You know, it’s not like the old days where there were CDs and things like that. But yeah, that’s I don’t have an answer for that one. Sorry.

46:14
That damn good answers.

46:17
But it is, you know, it’s just like I say it’s an insurance policy and sounds not something that I would rely on. Or use on a regular. In fact, I’ve never used it. But I’m telling you, if something did happen, it’s costing me, you know, maybe 6070 bucks a year, let’s just say it cost me 100 bucks a year for this. Well, I own a business, my QuickBooks, everything, how to use QuickBooks Online, it’s on local on my driver and all my files and all that, if I were to lose all that holy cow, you know, it’s the best 100 bucks a year that I that I you can spend. So depending on how important your stuff is, you may want to use online backup. Now, really, what you want to do is you want to use both, and that’s what I do. So I call Backblaze my insurance policy, I hopefully and we’ll never use them, it’s not as easy as time machine. And if something were to happen, you know, I can restore my time machine back, it’s Apple makes it really, really easy. Backblaze is pretty easy. But it’s it’s a no time machine. So Time Machine is what I what is my go to. And then an emergency like extreme emergency Backblaze. So what my friend could have done, if she had online backup, which I’m going to get her set up on what my friend could have done, she doesn’t have to necessarily worry about time machine, I still want her to use it. But let’s just say she didn’t use it for three months. Worst case scenario Backblaze could have FedExed over all of her stuff. And it would have been backed up, it just backs up in the background, she had to wait a day that she would have had all of her stuff, and a hard drive ready to go for her, you know, whatever she had to teach her, you know, us. So you kind of you really want to have both going Time Machine for ease of use daily habit, it’s great and I get a new computer, I can just restore from time machine, you know, that kind of thing. If I get a new one, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to restore from a time machine backup Backblaze. Hopefully, my goal is to never use Backblaze. But it’s there if I need it. But my goal is to not use it. I don’t want to rely on it. So that’s that’s online backup. Now what about Cloud Storage. So now we’ll get into the cloud where it gets a little bit more murky. So with the with the iPad and the iPhone, which I’ll get into shortly, is you know those backup to the to the cloud through iCloud and it backs everything up. It’s just all automatic. So it is the it is basically the Backblaze for the iPad and the iPhone. So that’s how the iPad and the iPhone work. The Mac it doesn’t work that way. I can keep stuff in specific folders. So I can keep things in my documents folder. I can keep things in my desktop folder. Those two folders are in iCloud. So far, my friend. Luckily what she did is she stored everything on her desktop. So being that everything was on her desktop, when she went into iCloud, she went over to her desktop folder. Everything was there. Perfect. She keeps some stuff in her Documents folder. Everything was there. But if she kept anything in any other folders, she would not be able to retrieve them. They were gone. But like say luckily what she did is she kept them in these two folders. So you can use that as a I guess you could call it a backup but it’s only going to use these two folders. Your documents and desktop. Now what about your photos? If you’re using iCloud Photo Library, I believe it’s just called iCloud Photos. Now, if you use an iCloud Photos, those are also stored in the cloud. So you don’t have to worry about those either. But if you’re not using iCloud Photos, then being that your photos app, let’s see here, I need to go to my arrow go like this. Go. And okay, so this is these are all the folders on my computer applications is not going to be backed up to into cloud into the cloud or anything like that. And downloads are not going to be backed up into the cloud. So you’re gonna lose everything in applications, you’re gonna lose everything and your downloads, movies, any movies that you keep, if you use iMovie. Those will be gone as well.

51:02
Public, that’s public, nobody uses that. But we’ll pick on music and pictures here now, pictures, everything is stored in an your photos library. Now if you’re using iCloud Photos, this library here is also stored in iCloud and you won’t lose anything. So you’re good there. So she is she’s good. She has everything in her documents. She has everything in her desktop. And she keeps her Photos Library in iCloud. So she hit the perfect, perfect storm. They’re the trifecta of thank God she had that. So that you know she doesn’t have to worry about losing anything. But if you do not use iCloud Photos, these photos will be gone too. Because iCloud only stores everything in your documents and desktop. Same thing with music. Now if you’re using the music app, and you use iTunes Match and this that and the other which probably not a lot of people are using anything in your music folder is going to be gone as well. So if you have a lot of music, you want to make sure that that is backed up on a time machine backup. And if it’s valuable music, you know stuff that you spent hours, you know, trying to you know mp3 In a setting the other then you want to make sure that you may you know maybe use Backblaze so I called storage on the Mac is not backup on the Mac. Basically what it does is it keeps track of two folders and you have to turn it on. So basically I’m gonna go to my System Preferences here. And if we go to iCloud Yeah, that’s not what I want to go to iCloud. This is where that cursor I’m gonna have to turn that off. So I think that is causing problems here.

53:01
No I’ll just do it that way. I go to iCloud here. What I have to do is I have to make sure that iCloud Drive here what I have to do is I have to make sure that that is turned on. And when I go to options here, I have to make sure that my desktop and documents folders turned on. Both of those have to be on if they’re not on then your desktop and documents folder are now being backed up or synced, I should say with iCloud and you will probably have to buy more space. Now we’ll just go with that but you know it’s relatively inexpensive 99 cents it starts out at but basically you’ll have to get more space and then you can use iCloud Now the beauty of this iCloud Drive with the desktop and documents is I have it turned on on my personal Mac because I’m able to access all of my documents from my phone from my iPad and this was great with my friend also, you know, like say we did the sharing screen which is new and I iOS 15 With FaceTime and I was able to see her files app and then I said tap on the desktop once we got in the files app and then boom all of her folders was there she was you should have seen how happy she was because they were all there. You know and she had access to him she’s so right from her phone she needed to print something out for for the class that was the following day. So she went right to her phone to open up a document and just started printing a primer doc from her phone. So the advantage of all this as you can access it from all your different devices. So iCloud is I would say a complement to a backup you don’t want to use on the Mac you do not want to use iCloud Back it up. It’s compliments, compliments Time Machine. All right. So I think that is what I have for the Mac, we’re going to switch gears now. Anyone have any questions on the Mac? All right. Let’s see here, what I got, oh, overall backup, I kind of covered that. But overall backup strategies, basically, what you want to do is plug in at least one hard drive to your Mac, if you have a really important stuff, maybe two, I think Chris has two or three of them, it just pings back and forth one hour, it’ll do it to one harddrive. And the next hour, it’ll do it to the other. And that is just in case one hard drive fails, you got you got another one. But at least you want you at least want to have one, just plug it in, you can format the drive. And then the Mac might even format it for you. And it’ll just start backing up. So backing up, then if you use a laptop, what I recommend doing is kind of put in that hard drive somewhere, make a routine out of it, make sure that you plug it in on a regular basis. So it could be while you’re having your morning coffee, it could be you know, at a certain time every day maybe before dinner or something along that line, but you want to you want to build some kind of a pattern to where you plug in that hard drive to that to that laptop. So then it is backed up. Otherwise what could happen is sure you have a time machine backup, but it’s three months old, because you haven’t plugged it in while if you have a Mac and iMac, plug it in and just leave it plugged in. There’s no harm, just leave it plugged in. And then if you really want to go extreme, you can go with an online backup, you know, like what I use is Backblaze. And then you have the best of both worlds. If something were to happen at the house, I could get it from, you know Backblaze. If you use iCloud, you can kind of use that as a backup but do not think of it as a complete computer backup. And not even want to call it backup, it syncs it basically syncs three things when you’re when you’re fully utilizing it, it will sync your desktop folder. So anything in your desktop, you’ll be able to get your documents folder. And then if you use an iCloud Photos, which I absolutely love. All your photos in the Photos app will be if you have any photos outside of the Photos app, in the Pictures folder, those will not be backed up, it only backs up stuff from their library. So it’s just those those three things that that you’ll be able to retrieve, I should say. So and you can use use this all together, I’d use this all together. I have two time machine backups. And then I also use iCloud. So I haven’t I haven’t gone online. And basically the backups just kind of work in the background. iCloud I’m able to access from any of my devices and it works great.

57:54
Great. Can you ask you said something about using? I mean, are you saying when people have their laptops are taken with them on the go. So that’s why I’m to make sure they plug in one. Basically, because I don’t take my back my laptop.

58:11
Okay, I took my when I went to Florida, I took my my computer, I did not take a backup with me. I mean, there’s you know, it’s I it really comes down to how comfortable how, how comfortable are you how far back, I knew that if something were to happen to my computer, I said go to Florida car gets broken into my computer stolen. There’s not a lot of work that I got done while I was down there. So I was comfortable. If something were to happen, I could buy a new computer and restore it from the day that I left. So good point in is you go somewhere. Always make sure you have a backup, you know, back it up before you go anywhere. So then you have the latest backup on there. One thing I forgot to mention, you know, if you don’t want to use Backblaze, you don’t necessarily have to use an online backup what I used to do, I used to plug in another external hard drive for time machine, you know, like so you can have 234 or five, whatever. And I would literally go and put it over at my sister’s house, she lives maybe a mile mile and a half away from me. I would literally literally go over there and once a month. If I remembered once a month I would grab that hard drive and then plug it in, get another backup and then I bring it back over there. So then if something were to happen at my house, I did at least have something from a month ago, you know it’s better than nothing. So it’s not it’s not a great strategy. But it’s a good strategy and it’s better than not having one at all. So that’s another option. Great to time machine backups and put someone you know put put it in a fire safe kind of thing to buy your fire safe safe. You know drop it off at a close A friend or family member or put it in a safety deposit box, people are still using those things. You know, that kind of thing. So you don’t necessarily have to go with an online. But the beauty of an online backup like Backblaze is it just works in the background. And I don’t have to worry about that. So that’s, that’s the beauty of it. And if I did have something, let’s say I had something, I was down in Florida, and I was working on something, guess where I could have got it from Backblaze? Because that’s continuously backing up even while I’m in Florida. It’s backing up. So I could have gotten in a specific document as well. So combination of the Yeah, so you want to use both, but that’s good. Chris. Yeah. You want to? Before you go anywhere? Absolutely. Run a backup.

1:00:46
Okay, do you have any kind of strategy for archival backup?

1:00:52
Nope, I don’t. That’s, that can get a little that can get. And that might be something in a later subject, that’s where you can use like raid drives, and that, like I have a raid drive sitting in front of me has five hard drives built in it, two of those hard drives could fail and guess I’d still be able to get everything off because they backup to each other, you know, kind of thing. It’s, but that gets expensive. And it’s still not a true archive. Because if something were to happen to the house, I would I would lose it all. But if that thing fills up, what I am able to do is pull one harddrive out and put a bigger hard drive in and then it would just automatically so you can just continuously. It’s almost like you can build it bigger and bigger and bigger. I use a Drobo system. Dr. OBO and I love it. But it gets expensive. But that’s you know, don’t really haven’t don’t really? Yeah, I don’t I’d have to think about that one. So all right. Yeah.

1:01:56
Yeah, quick question. screenshots that you take on your Mac. That are I guess, on your desktop? Yeah. I usually put them in a folder on my desktop. Just to make sure that because I’m gonna get a new machine. I’m to make sure that are they save to time? Imus? Yeah, back them up. Yep,

1:02:19
it does. Okay. And what I recommend doing this gets a little bit off off subject. You are absolutely right. Put them in a folder. You can have a lot of folders on your desktop. I sarcastically got a little mad at you know, because she was frantic. So I had to I had to tiptoe through it. But once we once we got everything all squared away and she got a new computer and booted up. Stored her desktop folder. She had 400 items on her desktop.

1:02:52
not exaggerating. Not in folders.

1:02:55
Not in folders. She maybe had a dozen folders. That was I said my I told her your homework. I haven’t followed up with her. I said your homework. Clean that up. But yes, put stuff in folders. Absolutely. Okay, so yep, you’re good. All right. So let’s, let’s talk about the iPad and the iPhone because these are the iPad and the iPhone. Super easy. There’s really not a whole lot of options with this. If you’re using iCloud, which is what I would recommend. All you have to do, I’m gonna go to my iPad and iPhone here.

1:03:35
And the iPad and the iPad.

1:03:37
Yeah. When I when I talked about that it’s you know, they they’re both very, very similar.

1:03:44
Again, yeah, can I because I I have a question but it really it really promotes for me I had it’s not on the iPhone and I don’t have a Mac. So, yeah, so I understood what you said. I mean, I have everything on iCloud. However. I also have on iPads. So you know, when you go to files, you have a setting that says iCloud and one as iPad on your iPads. There might be a couple of others. Yep. My question is, how do I back up with on my iPad because the iCloud is already backed up.

1:04:21
iCloud is already backed up. So,

1:04:25
sometimes I put things on my iPad. Okay. I think you

1:04:29
had you had an issue with that. So let’s I’ll go to my to, I’m going to go over to my iPad and iPhone here a minute. I put those slides in there. So I know where to put those chapter markers when I put the recording up. So what Kevin’s talking about is see here

1:04:51
can you cover or maybe in the future? If you can’t answer the question now because it’s going to be a little while. We’re backing up I’m backing up my iPad and my iPhone in the Finder on the Mac.

1:05:02
Yep, I’m plugging mine in. I think that’s the last slide. I’m gonna quick look out for that. Yep, I wasn’t sure. Yep. So let’s go to my Mac

1:05:19
All right, so I have I’m just going to use an iPhone. But an iPad worked the same way. I have an old iPhone here. And I want to back this up. Now, if you’re using, I believe it’s Mojave or earlier, you use iTunes for this, Apple switched over to the Finder and later Mac OS versions. But either way, it works roughly the same way. So I’m using Mac OS, Monterey. So the way that I have to do this is through the Finder. So essentially, all I have to do is just open up a new Finder window. And you’re going to see under locations phone. So now all I need to do is just click on this. It’s going to load it up, it’s reading everything from the phone. And now, all I have to do is just click on backup now and it’s going to backup that phone. So I just click on it. If I had an iPad plugged in here, I would see my iPad here. And I could do the same thing. So we can see that it is backing up my iPhone, it’s backing it up to my Mac. So then if I want to get done, if I were to lose this phone, or if I needed to erase it or something along that line goddess things little. If I were to erase this or anything like that, essentially all I have to do is plug it back in. So it’s going to show up here. And I click on Restore. I select the backup. And it’ll restore that so you can easily Backup and Restore right from the Finder here. And the iPad works the same way. I plug it in. So I’m not going to bother plugging in my iPad, but it works. It works the exact same way. So that’s all there is to backing it up so we can see it’s backing it up. And then if I want to manage the backups, I can do that. I don’t have any backups on here. But if I wanted to delete an old one, I could backup or delete an old backup. I can do the same thing on the iPad and iPhone, I believe. Does that answer your question on that?

1:07:33
Yes. Excellent. Yep.

1:07:36
And the only problem that I’ve seen with that issue with doing it that way, is that unless you have a large enough hard drive on your Mac, you could run out of space.

1:07:48
Which gets into my last thing managing your backups. Yes, exactly. Exactly. So it can fill up your IT can fill up iCloud, it can fill up your excuse me, fill up your your hard drive. And especially if you have a lot of devices I go through a lot of devices. So I excuse me drink some water here.

1:08:13
That’s why I have one terabyte. Yeah.

1:08:18
So you tickle in my throat. Essentially, the other problem that you run into is you have backups of all devices that you no longer have. And those are taken up space that can be taken up space and iCloud they can be taken up space on your Mac. So basically you want to manage these backups. So let’s first go back over to my Mac. If you’re if you’re using let’s see here, let’s go I go back over there

1:08:49
okay

1:08:55
well, once they’re out once did it again. It’s not what I want. And something’s going on here. Let’s try hold on here. Okay, not as pretty anymore, but that’s not the point. You’re going to see I have here manage backups. So if you’re using the Mac to backup your devices, what you can do is you can click on this and then just go and delete old backups pretty simple. But most people are going to be using iCloud to backup you know their their old ones. I’m talking about the iPad and the iPhone on the Mac. If you use time machine, you can erase a harddrive, which I talked about earlier. You know, buy another hard drive, if you just want to do that, that could be a way that you could archive it. Just keep buying new hard drives and put the other ones in, in your fire safe, safe, you know kind of thing. Oh, yeah. So too, and I’m not sooner, but

1:10:28
I need a new computer. This is what it’s telling me. So to wrap it up, basically, the Mac, I would recommend Time Machine, there are other people that they will say it doesn’t work for them, it might not work, it doesn’t work. It’s not 100% effective. But it is pretty darn close Apple, you know, it’s works good. And the whole idea with backup is you want you want it to be automatic. Because if you put any kind of a manual thing on it where you have to do it, you’re opening up the door to failure. If you have to manually back it up. It won’t happen probably you know Murphy’s Law, probably when you need it. It’s not going to be there you know kind of thing. So you want to have it just seamless in the background. So time machine on the Mac, backs everything up. Or anything happens you can restore from time machine. If you have anything critical business, anything like that, then what you’ll want to do is use an offline backup in addition to time machine with the iPad and the iPhone, highly recommend iCloud, you might have to pay for more storage, but use iCloud for that and it backs up once a day as long as it’s on a Wi Fi network. And you’re not using it. And it’s plugged in or getting power. So that kind of wraps up my backup. Basically, backup if anyone has any questions on it, feel free to email me dan at dance to Taurus, I know there’s it can get confusing. But really, it’s not that it’s not that difficult once you get it set up. And it’s easy, it’s pretty easy to overthink it. So just keep it simple. All I want to do is make sure that I have my information on my computer, on my iPad on my iPhone somewhere else, to where if something were to happen, I can retrieve it. That’s the whole idea. And Time Machine Backblaze. And iCloud will do all that for you. And it does it all automatic to where you don’t have to worry about anything, which is the beautiful thing. But email me at Dan at dance, Charles, if you have any questions, and I’ll be able to, I’ll be glad to give you more advice or try to figure something out. So thank you. Good. Good. I couldn’t refuse the

1:12:56
more more frequently I go over. I hear the things and I began. Yeah. concepts. So thinking better into my older gray matter. Yeah.

1:13:08
Yeah. And that you know it. Yeah, just don’t. As I always say, Don’t overthink it. If you overthink it, boom, things just kind of blow up. All you want to do is make sure that your data is somewhere else. So you can access it at a date or at a later time. Do I need to access an individual file at a specific time? No, I mean, the idea behind backup is emergency emergency. Not archival. Not you know like that kind of thing. So all right. Thank you, everyone. Next week. I will I should have this up online tomorrow. Sorry about the glitches it’s just telling me it’s telling me I needed a MacBook Air M one. A MacBook Pro and one very thorough Dan, thank

1:13:53
you very much.

1:13:54
Yeah, no problem. And yeah, we’ll see. We’ll see everyone next week. If you have any questions, just let me know. Thank you. Thanks, Dan. Yeah,

1:14:05
have a great day.

1:14:06
Thanks you too.

1:14:08
Bye. Bye.

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