If you don’t back up your Mac’s files, then it’s a matter of when—not if—you’ll lose data that’s precious to you. Apple already robbed Mac users of any excuse not to back up regularly with Time Machine. But a single bad power surge, or a true disaster like fire or vicious weather, could render your Time Machine backups worthless.
- Best Online Data Backup For Mac Crashplan Carbonite Switcher
- External Backup For Mac
- Data Backup For Mac
- Best Online Data Backup For Mac Crashplan Carbonite Promotion
- Best Backup For Mac
Fortunately, off-site backup is easier than ever. A slew of Web services offer affordable online backup for your Mac. These services are often simple to use as well: you install software from the service on your computer, and it backs up your files over the Internet. By keeping current copies of your treasured data far away from your home, you can feel far more confident that your files are safe.
I looked at six online backup providers: Backblaze, Mozy, Carbonite, JungleDisk, Dropbox, and CrashPlan. They all offer the same core approach, but vary significantly in precisely what they offer, what they charge, and how they work. Note that when you first start backing up your files with an online service, it can take some time to upload all your data—even days. If your Internet service provider caps your bandwidth, you may need to consider throttling your initial backup (by limiting how much data the backup service can transfer per day, or by limiting the number of files it backs up initially and ramping up over time), or instead choosing a service like CrashPlan that lets you send in a hard drive for your initial backup (with an additional cost).
Backblaze
Carbonite is one of the best cloud based backup services as it runs in the background of backing up your data. This is very helpful and no problem whatever crash happen to your computer. This is very helpful and no problem whatever crash happen to your computer. Best Cloud Backup Services 2018. A larger backup set definitely slows Carbonite's ability to process the files. To give the best chance of getting ALL our data back in a crisis.
Backblaze is a fairly typical example of how these online offerings work. The service costs $5 per month (or $50 for a year), which affords you unlimited backups for the files on a single computer, and any directly attached USB and Firewire hard drives. (Extra discounts are available if you prepay even more; the price gets as low as $3.96 per month if you pay for two years at a time.)
Like several services covered here, Backblaze places limits on what types of files it will back up. It specifically doesn’t back up the operating system, installed software, temporary files, or any files larger than 9 GB. Fortunately, seemingly huge files like your iPhoto, Aperture, or Lightroom libraries are generally smaller than they appear, since they’re really bundles of many files—which Backblaze can handle.
Backblaze’s software runs as a well-designed pane in System Preferences on your Mac. The options are simple: You can initiate a backup, check out restore options, or configure settings. The settings let you throttle how fast Backblaze backs you up (and thus how much of your bandwidth it consumes), exclude specific files, and browse reports and logs regarding just what the software is doing. On the whole, it’s very simple to navigate and configure the preference panel.
Backblaze backs up your files continuously (though you can switch to once daily or manually triggered instead), and keeps up to four weeks of file revisions. When you need to restore files, you can do so for free via a Web interface, or order your files on a DVD (for $99) or a USB drive (for $189).
Mozy
On the whole, Mozy is pretty similar to Backblaze. Mozy costs $4.95 per month per computer, or as little as $4.33 per month if you prepay for two years at a time. Like Backblaze, Mozy runs on your Mac as a preference pane. Also like Backblaze, the service keeps up to 30 days’ worth of file revisions, backs up your files continuously, and ignores certain file types like your applications. Mozy—again, like Backblaze—wisely uses what it calls “block level” backups, meaning that the service attempts to back up only new or changed portions of files, to save bandwidth and time. And, like Backblaze, it backs up any drives connected via USB or Firewire.
That said, Mozy’s file restoration options aren’t quite as good as Backblaze’s. You can order a DVD with your files, and its cost is variable: $30 for setup, 50¢ per GB of data, and $40 for shipping (via FedEx’s Next Day Air service). 60 GB of data would thus cost about $100. Mozy’s Web-based restore interface isn’t great, particularly when you need to restore larger amounts of data: Mozy generates multiple disk images for you to download—each about 1 GB. And I found that those downloads didn’t always keep my folder hierarchies consistent—different disk images would contain the same parent folder, with different files and subfolders in each image. You’re able to restore your data with Mozy, but the process is far more painful than it should be.
While Mozy’s preference pane isn’t as cleanly laid-out as Backblaze’s, it lets you accomplish most of the same tasks without much confusion: You can adjust how much bandwidth the software uses, exclude specific files, adjust the backup schedule, and browse logs.
Both Mozy and Backblaze offer free trials.
Carbonite
Carbonite’s offering isn’t quite as compelling, particularly for Mac users. The cost is about the same: $4.58 per month per computer, or as little as $3.61 if you prepay for three years in advance. By default, the service backs up photos, e-mails, documents, music, and personal settings, but you can also add videos, “executable files,” and files larger than 4 GB. Windows users get niceties like 90 days worth of file versioning, but the company doesn’t offer those features in the Mac version of its software.
Like Mozy and Backblaze, Carbonite’s main interface on your Mac is through a System Preferences pane—and the controls it offers are frustratingly sparse. You can enable a “low-priority mode to conserve bandwidth,” but the software lacks the more detailed bandwidth controls that other backup solutions offer. And the interface for excluding specific files and folders is needlessly clunky, since it lacks drag-and-drop support and instead forces you to work through a hierarchical file browser.
Carbonite cleverly tweaks your files’ icons so that you know their status: backed up, will be backed up, or excluded from the backup process. But that cleverness is outweighed by gaping holes in what the service offers. Since Mac can’t get past versions of their files, you can get burned if you delete something and want it back a few days later. Carbonite’s current failure to offer feature parity for Mac users is disappointing.
Also unfortunate is that Carbonite only allows you to get your files back via the Internet. That is, you can restore files via the preference pane or the Carbonite Website, but you can’t request a DVD or hard drive be shipped to you.
JungleDisk
JungleDisk takes a slightly different approach, both to pricing and backup method. The service offers two plans: Simply Backup and Desktop Edition. The former only backs up your files; the latter adds a Dropbox-like syncing feature that lets you mount your backup storage space like a network drive.
The Simply Backup service costs $2 per month, and the Desktop Edition costs $3 per month. But on top of those base prices, you need to pay for your storage space. JungleDisk lets you rely on either Amazon S3 or Rackspace for storage. Amazon charges 14¢ per gigabyte per month; Rackspace charges 15¢. But since Amazon also charges data transfer and data request fees and Rackspace doesn’t, Rackspace is probably the cheaper choice. Your first 5 GB of backup data are free.
If all that sounds a little complicated, that’s because it is. If you can wade through the initial complexities, though, JungleDisk has some distinct plusses. First, you can use the service with an unlimited number of computers. If you want to back up only about 20 GB of data on the Simply Backup plan, that’s about $5 per month total, which remains competitive with the other services. You can also customize how long JungleDisk keeps older versions of your files—though you must configure that manually—and of course, you must pay for the storage cost, too. And JungleDisk will back up whatever files you throw at it—applications included.
Unfortunately, though, JungleDisk’s interface doesn’t feel at all Mac-like; the software looks as if it were surgically transplanted straight from some older version of Windows. It’s usable, and you can mostly muddle your way through configuring settings like allowed bandwidth without getting lost. Sadly, choosing files to exclude is as painful as in Carbonite.
As with Carbonite, your only option for restoring old files is over the Internet; no restore DVD or hard drive option is available.
Dropbox
If you like the idea of JungleDisk’s Dropbox-esque Desktop Edition, it’s worth considering the backup abilities of Dropbox itself. While the popular (and Macworld Editor’s Choice award-winning) utility’s focus is on syncing files between multiple computers and devices, it’s a viable backup option, too. The service doesn’t offer unlimited data as an option, and you can’t get copies of your files sent to you on DVD, but it still offers some compelling features.
The free version of Dropbox offers 2 GB of storage space. You can get 50 GB for $9.99 per month (or $8.25 if you prepay for a year), and 100 GB for $19.99 per month (or $16.58 if you prepay for a year).
You install Dropbox on your Mac (and as many other Macs, PCs, and iOS devices as you’d like), and it creates a seemingly magical folder: anything you drop in that folder quickly syncs with any other computers linked to your Dropbox account. Even better, every file you sync with Dropbox is available via the Dropbox Website, too. By default, Dropbox keeps earlier revisions of your files for the past 30 days—and those revisions don’t count against your storage quota. If you pony up for the Pack-Rat option—which costs $3.99 per month or $39 per year—you get unlimited version history for all your files.
Like Carbonite, Dropbox uses tiny graphics atop your files’ icons to indicate whether the file has already synced or is currently syncing. And like JungleDisk, you can back up any kind of files you’d like to Dropbox, including software, as long as you have the space available. With Dropbox’s recent 1.0 release, the service introduced selective syncing. That means you can sync everything you put in Dropbox to the cloud, but choose which specific computers those files get synced to—making it an even more worthy of consideration.
As a pure backup solution, Dropbox seems to offer less (limited storage) for more (a higher price). But when you couple its backup abilities with its core syncing behavior and ubiquity across devices, it becomes more compelling.
CrashPlan
The last online backup solution I checked out was CrashPlan. For free, the software lets you back up your files to computers belong to your friends and family. That’s fine, and a smart way to start getting off-site backups. But since everyone’s hard drive space is at a premium, and your friends’ uptime can’t be relied upon, the for-pay online-backup plans are where the real action is.
The premium offerings are called CrashPlan+. You can choose among three options: CrashPlan+ 10 GB gives you 10 GB of storage for $2.50 per month, or as low as $1.46 per month if you prepay for four years. CrashPlan+ Unlimited removes the 10 GB cap, and can cost as much as $5 and as little as $2.92 per month. And my favorite plan is CrashPlan+ Family Unlimited, which lets you back up between 2 to 10 computers for as much as $10 and as little as $6 per month, again depending on how far in advance you prepay.
CrashPlan keeps your deleted files forever, and those files don’t count against your quota if you’re on the 10 GB plan. While most of these online backup services offer some control over how much of your bandwidth to use, none can rival the fine-grained controls that CrashPlan offers; the standalone CrashPlan software lets you set precise usage maximums for both bandwidth (over WAN and LAN connections) and total CPU utilization. Even better, you can configure unique values for those settings for when your computer is idle as opposed to when you’re using it.
The software won’t win any Apple Design Awards, but it’s smartly organized and makes configuration a snap. You can set multiple file destinations—meaning you can back up your files both to CrashPlan Central, the traditional online backup repository that the company offers, as well as other friends’ computers.
You can restore your files via a Web interface or the software itself. CrashPlan will send a hard drive with your data from between $125 and $165, depending upon how fast you need it. The service can also be configured to send you emails or messages on Twitter if your computer stops sending backups to CrashPlan properly.
The bottom line
These services have plenty in common, but it’s the tiniest implementation details that set some apart. You want your offsite backups to be consistent, timely, dependable, and easy to restore—and to avoid bogging down your computer while they do their thing. My data is important to me; I have years of writing, along with thousands of photos and videos of my kids. I’ve chosen to depend on a combination of CrashPlan and Dropbox, coupled with local backups. All of these services (with the possible exception of JungleDisk) are easy to get up and running, but CrashPlan and Dropbox offer substantial benefits in terms of feature set and ease of getting your data restored when needed.
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Nothing lasts forever; not even your Mac. Despite its advanced security updates and features, your Mac is not immune to cyber attacks and data breaches.
Also, you can’t protect your System against sudden power failure which might render it non-functional. So it’s a good idea to keep a backup of your data files and nothing better than a mac backup software can do the job for you.
This article outlines the most reliable and best backup software for Mac available for you to save your personal and professional files.
Best Mac Backup Software
1. Right Backup
Price – $14.99/per month
One of the best backup software Mac, Right Cloud Backup, comes up with an automatic 12-hour scheduler, to update your data in every 12 hours. Let’s look at the features:
- Right Backup provides you with two options to restore your data: Smart Restore and Custom Restore. Smart Restore option lets you restore selective folders quickly, wherein Custom Restore option enables you to restore the files you want manually.
- As it is compatible with multiple platforms, you can access your data anytime, anywhere and from any device with a single Right Backup account.
- If you ever lose your device, you don’t need to worry about the data it contains if you have got it all backed up in your Right Backup account. All you need to do is log in to your account and retrieve the documents, photos, music or videos that you want back. Get it here
2. Time Machine –
Pre Installed as part of Mac OS X/macOS Leopard and later
Another best backup solution for mac is Time Machine. It is brilliant inbuilt appple backup software for Mac. Let’s look at the features of the same:
- It is great for incremental backups that enable you to recover data that has been accidentally deleted.
- If the system crashes and you have lost the data, Time Machine will recover the data for you. Moreover, it makes it necessary to reinstall the OS on a new drive and start from scratch.
- It is not that safe as it has a single-destination backup strategy, so you should have a dual strategy. To do that, you need to regularly create backups to a different destination as well, be it an external hard drive or a cloud storage service in addition to Time Machine backups. Know More
Also Read: Best Mac Cleaner Software to Optimize and Clean your Mac
3. Carbon Copy Cloner –
Price – £32.25
Carbon Copy Cloner is one of the best backup software available for Mac. Let’s look at the features:
- As the name suggests, it allows you to make a clone of your Mac’s boot disk which means it enables you to copy every bit of data.
- The software can also be used to backup specific folders and set them as a task. Moreover, you can schedule a task.
- You can also set to receive notifications when a task has run.
- Moreover, Carbon Copy Cloner can also execute a shell script before or after a task is run.
4. SuperDuper –
Best Online Data Backup For Mac Crashplan Carbonite Switcher
Price – $27.95
SuperDuper is another software which is widely used for cloning a Mac OS X disk. Let’s look at the features:
- Like Carbon Copy, it can create a bootable copy of your startup disk.
- It can copy a specific folder to any chosen destination.
- SuperDuper! has several pre-configured tasks in a drop down menu to choose from, once you’ve specified the source and destination.
- The software is popular because of a feature called Sandboxing, which allows you to install potentially risky drivers or system updates without fear of creating an unbootable or unworkable system or losing access to your critical personal data.
Also Read: Best Video Converter Software for Mac
5. Data Backup for Mac –
Price – $35
Data Backup for Mac is one of the best backup software for Mac due to its simple and flexible interface. Let’s take a look at the features:
- It allows you to choose from four different types of backups: clone; incremental; versioned and simple copy when you create a backup. You can also schedule the backup.
- Data Backup provides you with two ‘Quick Backup’ options: All documents to CD/DVD or ‘iPhoto and other Pictures’ to CD/DVD.
- You can also customize the backup set from scratch and specify your own source and destination, which can be another hard drive or a USB stick or any other device.
6. Acronis True Image on Mac
Price – From $34.99 to $59.99(Premium)
Yet another best backup software for Mac, Acronis True Image is multi platform software. Let’s check out the features.
- It protects everything with full image backup be it the operating system, programs, settings, files, or boot information.
- It enables you to backup to external drives, NAS devices, network shares, and the cloud. Back up phones and tablets.
- Acronis Notary™ is a feature which uses blockchain technology to ensure a file’s authenticity.
7. Crashplan –
Price – Free as local backup; from $59.99/year for offsite backup service
CrashPlan is one of the best free backup software for Mac as it offers the best way to backup and stores personal, business & enterprise data securely – offsite, onsite or on Cloud. Let’s look at the features:
- The only software which provides free local and offsite backup. Just install the software and start backing up whether off site or on CrashPlan servers.
- CrashPlan provides you with unlimited online backup storage. No storage size limits, bandwidth cap or file-type restrictions.
- It has a simple and clutter-free interface that makes it easy to use.
- It allows you to pause and restore backups. Moreover, if you have huge GBs of data to be restored, you don’t need to pause or restore every time you shutdown or restart your Mac, CrashPlan will automatically do it for you
Also Read: 15 Best Video Editing Software for Mac
External Backup For Mac
8. Carbonite –
Price – From $59.99 per year (free trial available)
Carbonite is also a good iMac backup software for Mac. Let’s look at the features:
- Carbonite, personal cloud backup allows you to easily protect your files, photos and more.
- It provides you unlimited cloud storage.
- You can restore files with just a few clicks.
- All the files are safe as Carbonite encrypts your files at every step.
Price – $5/month, or $50/year (15-day free trial available)
Backblaze is another online backup service which is one of the best mac backup software. Let’s take a look at the features:
- It not only secures your data on their servers with encryption but also uses two-factor authentication which sends you a code to your phone, adding an extra layer security.
- It allows you to sign in anywhere from any computer to download a zip file.
- The business version centralizes billing and administration, empowering you to manage your team’s backup needs.
10. ChronoSync –
Price – $49.99
Data Backup For Mac
This all in one tool is also considered to be the best backup software for Mac as it works for file synchronizations, backups, bootable backups and cloud storage as well. Let’s take a look at the features:
- ChronoSync allows you to create filters for synchronization. These work in a similar way to smart searches in the Finder. You click ‘+’ to add a rule and then choose from filters and attributes.
- You can run sync or backup tasks on daily, weekly or monthly schedules.
- It sends email notifications on scheduled task completion.
Must Read: How To Check Disc Space On Mac
Best Online Data Backup For Mac Crashplan Carbonite Promotion
Best Backup Solution for Mac
Best Backup For Mac
Backing up your data is the wisest decision to keep your data secure and avoid data loss. A mac backup solution will help you ensure the protection. If you haven’t opted for a backup solution so far, we recommend you to have one as you never know when you get clutched in the hands of cybercriminals. In the worst case scenario, if your data gets stolen or lost, your backup solution will save the day.
Check out the list of some of the best apple backup software for Mac. Try them and let us know which one works for you.
Check out the list of some of the best apple backup software for Mac. Try them and let us know which one works for you.