If you use iCloud Drive for everything, do you still have other backups?

[Luba]

I'm thinking of getting the max subscription size of iCloud Drive for $10 per month or $120 per year. Since Apple is taking care of iCloud Drive, maybe I don't need to make backups anymore??

Will encrypted a file or a folder and then store in iCloud Drive increase the change of the file or folder becoming corrupted? I more worried that a file can't be accessed versus someone seeing or taking my files.

 

[HDFan]

maybe I don't need to make backups anymore??

No, you need multiple backups if you care about your files. iCloud might be considered one of the recommended 3.

 

[techwarrior]

iCloud is not a backup per se. It is a redundant storage place for certain files, but not the OS itself, or OS settings. It is generally pretty secure and effective, but it is not a total backup solution.

Local USB or NAS for Time Machine should probably be one added step. It ensures in the event of a HDD failure, you can restore everything including OS settings, Applications and their settings to the state of things before the failure.

From there, you can get more sophisticated, like Carbon Copy Cloner, etc.

 

[Rigby]

One feature critical for backups that iCloud is missing is versioning. You can't go back and retrieve an older version of a file that has been overwritten or accidentally deleted like you can with Time Machine or some other cloud storage services. Generally, I would never rely exclusively on a cloud service for backup.

Regarding encrypted storage, it depends on what kind of encryption software you use, but generally speaking it should not affect the probability of corruption. I store some data in Veracrypt containers on iCloud Drive and haven't experienced any issues. iCloud even does block-wise incremental synchronization now (i.e. if you only change a small file in a big container, it will not re-upload the entire container file but only a few blocks that have actually changed).