Backing Up My System

[jazzyjj]

Hi everybody. Yesterday I scheduled a Genius Bar appointment for Monday afternoon at one of the Apple stores in my area. I've been having a memory issue on my MacBook Air for a little while, and we think we know what's causing it but we want someone at the Genius Bar to take a look. The confirmation email I got yesterday said for me to back up my system prior to the appointment, and I'm wondering which method is preferred here. I was originally going to purchase an external hard drive, but then my father suggested I'd be better off using iCloud. A tutor and I recently tried to set up iCloud on my MacBook but ran into a bit of difficulty. I use Apple's on-board screen reader and it seems to work pretty well with iCloud, but we couldn't quite figure out how to set everything up. Another suggestion my tutor made is Google Drive, and he said some of his coworkers at school use it and like it. When he and I checked the amount of space for iCloud, we found out that it starts out at 5 gb which he said would probably not be enough for everything I have on here. I checked on Apple's support site and think I saw something about using a thumbdrive. I have 2 of those, but they both contain mp3 files. So would a cloud-based service be necessary or is Time Machine good enough? That also seems pretty accessible with the screen reader on here. Thanks in advance for anyone's assistance.

Comments

[foxfirefey]

Myself, I'd prefer an external hard drive (or big enough thumb drive? They do make them pretty big these days) + Time Machine, but that could be my lack of experience with iCloud. One thing I *do* know is it's much faster to back up than using iCloud, which would have to upload to the internet. The documentation that I'm looking at on Apple's site suggests that iCloud is good for backing up iDevices but it's not really talking about about being able to restore a Mac to a previous timepoint.

Time Machine is able to restore your system back to a previous point in time COMPLETELY, not just keep various files + settings + app data safe. You could take a back up, destroy the laptop, buy a new one, and just transfer over everything and it would be like nothing changed except the hardware.

I've used it before for big OS updates. I take a snap shot before I upgrade. It's saved my bacon when an update went bad--all I had to do was restore from the timepoint previous to the update.

[synecdochic]

Yeah, the issue with iCloud is that Apple only gives you 5G of disk space; after that you have to pay them. They also don't make it easy. IMO iCloud is good for "I need to have this thing accessible on multiple computers" and bad at backup.

Fortunately, Time Machine is very good at backup! Get an external hard drive, plug it into your computer, set up Time Machine, and forget about it: backups will happen. (My backups go to an external hard drive plugged into our Airport base station, so I don't even need to have anything plugged into the computer itself; all I need to do is be on the network.)

[kareila]

Seconding this. Just make sure your initial backup completes before your appointment, and you should be good. I've never had trouble restoring from a Time Machine backup, but I've occasionally had a backup fail to complete.

[jazzyjj]

Thanks for the replies. I'm at my parents' place for the weekend, and a sister of mine said that I could plug her external drive into my MacBook and she'll show me how to use Time Machine. So I guess we'll take it from there. I'm so looking forward to my appointment at the Genius Bar though! These MacBooks are awesome.



Edit June 13: Figured I'd edit this reply rather than post a new one because I'm lazy, lol! Anyway, I was able to back up my Mac using Time Machine and my sister's external drive and all went well. I also had my Genius Bar appointment last week as planned and it went great. They only confirmed our suspicion, i.e., that I need an external drive of my own because most of my hard-disk space is taken up by audio stuff. So earlier today one of my tutors and I placed an order on Best Buy's website for an external drive. It is supposed to be here by this Thursday, and one of my tutors will help me set it up and begin transferring stuff over. I'll report back here if we run into any problems, but in the meantime thanks for all your help.