The following solutions will help you follow this rule. The three copies will include the one on the computer, one on the local backup media and one in offsite backup like the cloud or a drive that you put at another place. That equates to 3 copies of your data on at least 2 kinds of media with at least 1 offsite backup. Remember to follow the 3-2-1 Mac Backup strategy. Use the keyboard shortcut COMMAND + SPACE and type Sys then hit Enter.To make sure you’re selecting the right one hover over the icons till the label System Preferences pops up over the mouse cursor. Click on the gray and black gear icon from the Dock (on the right end by default).

Click on the Apple icon button in the upper left corner of the screen and choose System Preferences.Third parties also offer complete and partial backup solutions.Ī few of these solutions will include opening System Preferences. Users can also backup selective data with things like iCloud, manual backup or file syncing services. These include Time Machine, which Apple builds into every Mac with OS X. We’ll round-up the best Mac backup options to help you. Apple includes a couple of tools within OS X that help with Mac backup, but users may want to consider some third-party tools as well. While iCloud Photos is a great way to sync your images across devices and have copies in the cloud, if you want to ensure that those precious moments stay safe and are backed up, then we advise also using software to create dedicated backups of not only your photos, but also documents and other data.MacBook users need to back up their hard drives full of pictures, documents, media files and more. So don’t! How to back up your Photos with software or external drives It’s worth emphasising again that if you were to delete any of these image stored in iCloud on any of your devices the original will be deleted in iCloud. This setting should result in a hefty reduction of the storage space your photos take up on your Mac, but without losing any of your images or sacrificing their quality (at least of the originals). Select the Optimise Mac Storage option and the existing full-resolution images on your Mac will be replaced with the smaller alternatives.

Once in the iCloud tab, you’ll notice there are two main options available: Download Originals to this Mac and Optimise Mac Storage.

Follow the steps outlined above for enabling iCloud Photo Library.

How to manually backup mac to icloud