I'm surprised that I hear from so many people that they still use cloning as a way to backup
their hard drive.
Cloning is a method where you use a special piece of software to make an exact duplicate
of your internal hard drive on your Mac.
You put this on an external hard drive and you've got a clone of what is on your Mac.
But it's not a good backup solution.
It's not nearly as good as simply using the Time Machine software built into your Mac.
Let me show you why.
So the advantages of a backup over cloning are that it stores a copy of all of your files,
even ones you've deleted.
The way it does this is it does this through incremental backups.
It's storing every file you've got on your Mac now and then as you make changes it's
recording those changes.
So you create a new file it adds a new file.
If you change a file it takes the changed file but it keeps the old file as well.
If you delete the file it keeps around the old deleted version even as that version gets
days, weeks, and months old where hasn't even been on your drive, it will still be there
on the backup because it's doing it incrementally.
You can go back in time which is why it's called Time Machine.
You can go back in time to see what your hard drive looked like yesterday, last week, last
month.
So you can find deleted or modified files.
It keeps this history there and it's so much more useful than a clone.
I'll show you why.
The other reason is, of course, the Time Machine is just built in.
You don't have to have any special software.
You don't have to learn really much to use it.
You just attach an external drive and Time Machine will automatically back your things
up once you've set it up.
Now let me show you why cloning fails in a lot of cases.
Let's say it's Monday and you create three files, A, B, and C. These are important files
and you want to make sure they're backed up.
So you're cloning your drive and you do your clone.
Maybe it's running automatically which would be great.
Maybe you have to do it manually.
At the end of the day you've got a clone, an external drive, that also has A, B, and
C.
This is great.
You've got them on your internal drive and you have backups on your clone, on your external
drive.
You can go to sleep feeling secure that your files are backed up.
Now the next day you start off and you have A, B, and C on your hard drive as well.
Now here's where the problem comes in.
You accidentally delete file B. Okay, it's not a disaster.
It's deleted but it's still backed up on your clone.
But you haven't yet realized that you've made this mistake.
Now you go and you clone your drive again.
You make sure that the external drive is an exact duplicate of your internal drive.
So it backs up files A and C. It doesn't back up file B. As a matter of fact it removes
it there because it wants to make it an exact duplicate of the internal drive.
So you no longer have file B either on your internal drive or on your clone.
You don't realize this as you go to sleep.
You think everything is backed up and fine.
The next day you get up and you look and you see files A and C and you realize, oh no file
B is missing.
What did I do.
Let me go back to my backup.
You have your backup from Tuesday and you're looking for file B but it's not there.
This is the problem with cloning.
This is why incremental backups, like Time Machine, are so much more superior.
Now there's still uses for clones.
The primary use that people historically use clones for is for emergency swap out.
So imagine you've got a desktop tower.
It has an internal drive in there.
You can undo a little latch on the back of your machine.
You see all your drives.
There's the drive that failed.
Pull that drive out and you take your clone, which is on the same type of hard drive, you
stick it in, you close the back of your machine up.
You boot it up and you're running again.
This is great when you have like critical machines.
You're running some sort of critical system at work and you want to make sure that your
down time is almost nothing.
You fine out that your hard drive failed.
You can swap it out with your clone and get right back to work.
It's not as big a deal today for most people to actually get back to work from an incremental
backup.
Say your hard drive fails.
Well, you're probably going to get a new hard drive.
Or maybe you find that the hard drive still works fine but for some reason all the data
is gone.
You can still restore your system and then restore from Time Machine.
It may take a few hours to do it if you have a lot of data but you can get back to work.
For cloning, of course if it's a critical system and you're more of a tech and you know
all of the hardware and all that you can get back to work quicker.
But most people don't need this today.
In the rare case that you need to use your clone it's really not that time sensitive.
You can also use a clone as a secondary backup just before something big.
Like you're about to update your system.
You're about to swap out the screen or keyboard or something and you're like, okay I have
a Time Machine backup but I'd really like a second backup.
Let me use this cloning software to create a clone of my drive.
It takes an hour or two, whatever.
You create this clone and now you feel more secure.
You have two backups.
Cloning is useful for that.
You can also when moving to a new drive use cloning.
So you're not actually creating the clone as a backup there.
You're actually cloning to a new drive and then swapping the drives out.
Again, this assumes you have a system where you can swap drives out yourself.
You know if you've got like a MacBook or an iMac or something like that chances are you're
not going to be doing this yourself so there's really no point in using clones for that.
There are better options than cloning if you want to do a second backup.
A lot of people do do Time Machine for their first backup and cloning for their second
backup.
A better option is just a second Time Machine backup.
You can do multiple Time Machine backups.
All you need to do is go into System Preferences, select another disk for Time Machine, and
when you select another disk it will prompt you and say do you want to use this disk now
for Time Machine or do you want to use both.
Now you've got two Time Machine drives and you can basically just swap them out.
This works great for people that bring their MacBook from work to home and they have one
drive in each place.
Or even at home you can decide to have that second Time Machine backup and every once
in awhile swap that with the first one and you kind of have these two backups going on.
Time Machine does this without really any trouble at all.
Online backup is a great option.
This is what I use.
So you can use something like Backblaze or CrashPlan or something like that.
There are many options out there if you have a fast internet connection.
So you've got a local drive that's backed up but that won't save you in case of a fire
or something like that because everything is here in one room.
But an online backup is great because it's offsite.
So a secondary backup is a great opportunity for an online backup.
Also, cloud storage for documents.
Cloud storage isn't great as a backup solution by itself.
But as a secondary backup it's really great because if you know you have all your stuff
stored, say on iCloud or Dropbox or something like that, and you have a backup you know
your documents are in multiple places.
They're on your computer, they're in this remote server location, and they're on your
Time Machine backup.
So doing that that way you've got now your files in at least three locations.
The cloud storage is probably backed up multiple ways by the cloud service you're using which
is why you never hear about failures with cloud services because they're always putting
them on multiple drives and they have arrays of drives and things like that.
So there's some great solutions for secondary backup instead of cloning which isn't a great
solution.
Certainly not a great solution for primary backup and it isn't that great for secondary
backup either.