Using iCloud Drive as a backup system

[Jacobi]

I have seen a lot of posts stating that iCloud Drive is a sync system, not a backup system. But the way I would primarily like to use it is as follows: On the hard drive of my Macbook Air, I keep all of my "working files" that I actually use. Periodically, I'll make a copy of my documents and put them in a backup folder on iCloud drive. That way they are on there if something happens to my laptop. But I don't intend to actually USE those files on iCloud Drive.

Is there anything wrong about my logic here or how iCloud Drive works? I assume others are talking about the scenario where you are actually opening files from iCloud Drive as your only working copy.

As a follow-up question, if I have these backup folders on my iCloud Drive, do they automatically get downloaded to my MacBook's hard drive (meaning I would have two local copies) or is that only if I start opening files from that folder?

Thanks in advance for the help -- it is strangely difficult to find detailed information about iCloud Drive on Apple's website.

 

[coolajami]

I’m staring by saying that it is not possible to keep a folder online only in iCloud that will not sync with a folder in your local HD.

That said, if you setup an iCloud folder in your HD and choose the option "optimise storage" in settings, the icloud will keep some of the files/folders online only. The problem is that you have no control over which files/folders will be kept online only. Another problem is that you'll end up having two copies of the same folders in your HD, one that will sync with iCloud and one that will stay offline. This is not a particularly good arrangement for a backup and can mess up things for you pretty easily. There are ways to make sure that these two folders are synced between them (Hazel app can do that, and it is amazingly powerful) but this arrangement will keep using space on your local HD and it is not recommended as a backup.

If you're an MS Office user, you can use OneDrive (1TB space, that's great!) to make an online only folder that you can sync with your HD work folder again through a third-party app. Same applies with Dropbox and most others cloud storage services. They work much better on this aspect when compared with iCloud but still this is not a bulletproof backup solution.

If you're really looking for an online backup service that works very well, I would suggest BackBlaze. It is like having an time-machine online.

 

[Jacobi]

Thanks for your reply. Part of the reason this may work for me is that I'm not backing up a large volume of data -- it's mainly documents and records, not media files or anything large. So it's not a big deal for it to take up extra space on my hard drive. But I suppose I could also just use Google Drive instead, since I have a Gmail account.

 

[ApfelKuchen]

If it helps you to think of it as a "backup" and if you do not use iCloud Drive as a way of accessing/syncing documents across multiple devices.... then there's nothing fundamentally wrong with doing this. You have cloud storage, you place a document in cloud storage. End of story.

However, you're making more work for yourself. If you directly work on the document(s) in the iCloud Drive folder, rather than copy a "finished" document into iCloud drive, then changes are automatically saved. In other words, by doing things the way you prefer, you're ignoring potentially useful features of working in the cloud.

While I can't say, "I don't understand why people have a problem with this...", I am amused by people's resistance to a model of client/server computing that's been around since there have been corporate document servers (which is nearly forever). The only fundamental difference between "the cloud" and traditional corporate servers is the physical location of the server (somewhere in the same office building vs. somewhere on the Internet). Client/server software has gotten far more sophisticated over the decades, with features like local caching that ensure documents will be accessible at times when an internet connection is not available. But overall? This is not some sort of newfangled, un-tested technology.

 

[ght56]

There is nothing wrong with this method, but it is important to point out that this solution would be a manual point-in-time backup system without any sort of automated incremental backup. It's not a very robust backup solution on its own. Especially if you work with a lot of documents, having automatic incremental backups stored elsewhere can be of immense benefit, and so I would recommend still having an external drive to use with Time Machine. Your system does create local snapshots, but having these on a separate physical disk means more restore points as well as additional protection should the Mac suffer hardware failure or massive file corruption. Especially if you have to overwrite previous backups when copying your local documents over to iCloud Drive, the incremental backups of Time Machine can be useful should an individual file suffer from corruption.

 

[Erehy Dobon]

There is nothing wrong with this method, but it is important to point out that this solution would be a manual point-in-time backup system without any sort of automated incremental backup. It's not a very robust backup solution on its own. Especially if you work with a lot of documents, having automatic incremental backups stored elsewhere can be of immense benefit, and so I would recommend still having an external drive to use with Time Machine. Your system does create local snapshots, but having these on a separate physical disk means more restore points as well as additional protection should the Mac suffer hardware failure or massive file corruption. Especially if you have to overwrite previous backups when copying your local documents over to iCloud Drive, the incremental backups of Time Machine can be useful should an individual file suffer from corruption.

Dropbox offers basic document historical backups or at least did at some point with their free Dropbox Basic service tier.

I believe you need to log into the service via a web browser to be able to access previous document versions; naturally Dropbox Basic did not have infinite backups.

I have been using Dropbox pretty much through its entire 13-year existence -- long before iCloud Drive showed up; the Dropbox service has been pretty reliable all these years.

Dropbox should not be considered a full backup service; it is better viewed as a document storage service.

These days I'm storing more documents in iCloud since the integration with macOS and iOS is tighter and many of Apple's first-party apps use iCloud heavily.

Dropbox is still a good cloud storage alternative; it would be foolish to rely on just one.