Or using a cloud service other than iCloud, if necessary.Īs an example: My old MacBook Pro had a SDCard slot. Or another machine in your local network. The simple solution of plugging in an external SSD, HD or just a plain old USB sticks is way more flexible. That has to do with the way the backups are made (hard links, deduplication) and with the speed and transfer volume, that was necessary.Īlthough it still *is* possible to do what you plan, it is not advisable. But they stopped offering it, as it hardly worked as expected. Well, then it was called 'MobileMe', the predecessor to iCloud. There was time when Apple was offering backups to iCloud. A problem all the Big Sur beta testers ran into: when they restored back to Catalina, their Big Sur Backup was unaccessible. There is no way to access the backup when you need to restore your machine (like when you try to get a working system after some crash).Įven if you set up the new/recovered machine completely, wait for the iCloud sync to finish (which restores your data to your local drive) and then try to restore data, the backup would not be available - since the OS installation now is different from the OS installation then. If a virus deletes your drive, your backup will be deleted as well. If a trojan encrypts your drive, your backups will be encrypted as well. You are effectively slashing the capacity of your drive by half.Īnything that messes with your local drive will also mess with your backup. You now are using 200 GB of your local drive (100 GB data and 100 GB 'backup'). and then sync the information to the iCloud storage somewhere on Apples servers. If you have, say, 100 GB of user data on your machine and would backup it to the iCloud, what macOS would do is copy the files to the local path ~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/.

This means that everything you put 'into' the iCloud is also available on your local drive. ICloud is some storage somewhere at Apple and a sync engine which syncs the contents to your local drive. There are quite a few reasons, why doing that is not a good idea.

How to backup mac to icloud mojave