One is the password to my iMac, and the other is the password to an encrypted file on the iMac (and backed up to a USB stick) containing all my other passwords. There are two passwords that I must not ever forget. If my house burned down and all that is in it, I'd be reliant on the online provider to get stuff back.Īs the Time Capsule is always on and always connected, I guess ransomware would get at that too, but the external drive and the online backups would presumably escape. I've never had a flood come into the house, but all my computer stuff is upstairs anyway. My backup with them is currently just under 2TB.

The only thing that requires an ongoing subscription is the online backup provider, for which I pay $60/year. Pretty much everything on my iPhone exists in the iCloud and therefore on my iMac also.

My PC, for example, only exists to be able to run VR applications. places where I create things that I don't want to risk losing. In some cases that is none, by choice, because they are not places where 'work' happens, i.e. I have various other computing devices with their own backup provisions. I have more often had reason to go delving into the Time Machine backups to retrieve old versions of current files. I have only once needed to restore a whole machine from backup (which worked). All of my computing devices need a password (or thumbprint, or face id) to log in. I forget how often, but I get regular reports that it does.Īll of these backups are encrypted. When it does that I go get the HD, plug it in, and start the backup.įinally, I have a contract with an online backup provider. I hardly notice this happening (but I do know that it is happening).Įvery ten days it reminds me to backup to an external HD that I keep hidden the rest of the time. My iMac automatically backs up to a Time Capsule every hour. The key is to set things up once so as to hardly need to think about them again.

Duplicacy restore to new machine