Arq Overview - Backing Up Data from Mac OS X and Windows to the Cloud. Back up macOS Back up mac
In order not to lose your dear Mac OS X configuration settings and a set of installed and correctly configured programs, you need to make backups of your operating system from time to time.
Despite the reliability and stability, MAC OS X nevertheless, it can “crash” due to incorrect user actions. And at the most inopportune moment. But after all, no one wants to lose their personal, so dear to the heart, the configuration of the settings and the set of installed and correctly configured programs ...
In order not to find yourself in such a situation, it is imperative to make backups of your operating system from time to time.
Unlike the numerous difficulties and prohibitions associated with cloning living beings, no one bothers to create an exact copy of your Mac OS X on another piece of hardware.
Cloning animals is difficult, long and unlawful, but operating systems are simple, fast and, in a sense, even obligatory.
So, we create our "apple" sheep Dolly.
Time machine
There are many ways. The first option for backing up your system is in MAC OS X itself, starting with version 10.5 and later. This is Time Machine.
Time Machine automatically backs up the system and all important files on an external hard drive and must "go back in time" to restore system files to their original state at the time you need it. If you enable Time Machine in " System Preferences"(System Preferences), it will offer itself to create" backups "(backup copies) and ask for a directory to save them.
But Time Machine has a couple of drawbacks. The first of them is that it "eats" disk space very quickly. Although not completely. After the first backup, Time Machine continues to save only changed files.
The second problem is that automatic copying prevents it from working normally, starting by itself.
In order to somehow level this out, let's turn to additional applicationto configure Time Machine itself.
It's TimeMachineEditor. You can download it. TimeMachineEditor will allow more flexible customization of the schedule of their procedures. For example, every hour on Mondays, every day after work, and so on.
Using this utility, we increase the intervals of "time jumps", "curbing the appetite" of the Time Machine itself, and adjusting its backup sessions to a convenient schedule.
Thus, Time Machine has the ability to back up your system in case of various failures and "roll back", but it is cumbersome and not very convenient for this purpose. Including the "backup" disk is not bootable and requires starting from the Mac Os X installation disk for recovery.
Disk Utility
Another way to "grow" your "clone sheep" is to use the standard disk utility... By default, it is located in the Applications / Utilites folder.
We launch this application and select the name of your system disk in the menu on the left, for example, X. Now drag the icon of your start disk (X) to the “Source” line window, and drag the disk icon to the “Destination” line, on which will save your clone, for example, Backup. This can be an external FireWire or USB drive, or an internal hDD or a flash drive of sufficient volume.
If you need to format this directory beforehand, switch to "Erase". For external media, the format does not matter (as a rule, it is Mac OS Extended Journaled, and for a hard disk on a Mac with an Intel processor, it is preferable to select the "GUID Partition Table".
Now click on "Restore" and enter your password. Go.
After a while, another "Dolly sheep" will appear - an absolute copy of your system disk.
Now, if your Mac OS X “crashes” fatally, and no “remedies” will help, you can repeat this procedure on the contrary, replacing the damaged system with your saved copy.
To do this, you need to "start" from the backup system itself: turn on your Mac, holding down the option key, then select the disk with the ready clone as bootable (in our example, Backup) and perform the recovery procedure in reverse order.
But before doing this, you should definitely try to "cure" the damaged system with the same "Disk Utility".
Select the "damaged" disk in the left menu (in our example it is X and in the "First Aid" section do the following procedures: "Verify Disk Permission" and, if necessary, do "Restoring access rights" ( Repair Disk Permission) and, accordingly, "Verify Disk" - "Repair Disk".
The familiar OnyX program can also provide irreplaceable help here.
Despite the simplicity of cloning using Disk Utility, this method has one drawback. Absolutely all, without exception, information is copied. And if we are talking about a spare disk, small in volume, or even a flash drive? The files on them may simply not fit.
What's the choice?
There are many possibilities for cloning your "Dolly Sheep". Up to using the command line according to the instructions from Apple itself. To mere mortals, other utilities such as SuperDuper !, Clone X, Tri-BACKUP or MacTuneUp may seem more accessible. In my opinion, the most advanced among them, convenient and at the same time absolutely free is called Carbon Copy Cloner.
Carbon Copy Cloner is manufactured by Bombich Software. You can download it. Voluntary donations to developers (Donate) are welcome.
Mike Bombich, the creator of this wonderful program, in an interview with a popular American site, highlighted the "highlights" of his brainchild: the speed of the cloning process, the possibility of selective data transfer and additional protection against accidental actions in the form of a special list of all possible candidate disks with a request their ID (Unique identifier).
Carbon Copy Cloner allows you to create a full or partial clone of your system by transferring it to another disk or saving it as a.dmg (disk image). In the latest versions of Carbon Copy Cloner focused on the system Snow leopard (Snow Leopard), compression in the HFS + file system is supported, the display of folder and disk sizes in the decimal system has become noticeably more convenient, the copying speed has increased, and Time Machine databases are ignored if they have already been created.
Carbon Copy Cloner can come in very handy when upgrading your system drive and replacing it with a larger one. It is enough to transfer the previously rejected system to a new disk.
Before you start creating a backup of your system, it would be a good idea to first clean up all the "garbage" accumulated in the system using the OnyX utility and put it in order.
Install Carbon Copy Cloner and launch. If necessary during work, enter your usual password and unlock the "lock" at the bottom left.
In the upper left, in the Source Disk menu, select the one from which your system will be cloned (in our example, this is drive X).
At the top right, Target Disk, select the one that will save the "twin" of your MAC OS X. (In our case, X2. It is important to note that this utility has the ability to write the system in dmg format and even to a remote computer over the network.
Now let's take a look at another feature of Carbon Copy Cloner: create special filters that allow you to exclude some files from the clone by extension, for example. Mkv or .avi, and then movies of this format are not cloned. This will help save space.
In order not to complicate our life, we will try to manually do some preliminary procedures to facilitate the backup system and speed up the cloning process.
It is not necessary to save on backup system your entire media library: digital photos, music, films, supporting documentation, and so on. And also working files, which can "weigh" more than one gigabyte. You can also opt out of "heavy programs" if there is not enough space on the backup disk.
Find Items to be copied in the left window and look carefully, turning off some of the checkboxes opposite unnecessary files... If they are not randomly stored on your disk, they will most likely be the Users / macuser (your username) directories. For example, in this configuration, turn off the Calibrie Library and the books it contains. After all, they have already been recorded on a separate DVD.
Then, in the Cloning options section on the right, select Incremental backups of selected items, this dynamic mode will allow you to transfer only the changed data when you update the version of the spare system next time. The checkbox below Delete items that don’t exist on the source in synchronization mode will not "take" old programs and other files that you have not used for a long time.
Protect root-level items on the target will preserve superuser mode if you are. Finally, Archive modified and deleted items will create a separate archive of modified and deleted files. In my opinion, it is better to turn it off so as not to waste time.
In the event that Carbon Copy Cloner "gives the go-ahead" - This volume will be bootable - which means there is enough space on the spare disk or flash drive, and this volume will become bootable, you can start.
Any presets you have made will be saved if you click Save Task in case you are going to clone your disk on a specific schedule, like in Time Machine. But for creating a backup Mac OS X, this is hardly useful.
Click Clone.
How many files are stored on your system drive? It turns out tens of thousands. so the process can take some time: from fifteen minutes to an hour or two. It depends on the amount of information.
And so it ended. Now we have two Dolly sheep - mirrored Mac OS X. And you can be sure that you will not be left at the "broken trough" at the most inopportune moment.
The year 2011 is drawing to a close - we are all summing up its results, making plans for the future. Some promise to quit drinking, others - to smoke, and others - to play sports or lose weight. But, as a rule, it is difficult to say goodbye to habits if there is no strong desire and willpower. Why not promise to back up your Mac files next year?
This is much easier to accomplish than fighting bad habits or exhausting yourself with difficult physical exercises. In addition, if this is not done, sooner or later you can lose valuable and irreplaceable information on your computer. And if you consider that the backup should be done regularly, new beginnings will be enough for you for a whole year. Of course, this advice is not at all new and almost every user knows about the need to backup files, but this procedure should be done diligently and carefully so as not to start the process of irreversible changes on the device's hard drive.
A year earlier, Chris Breen detailed the process in his How to Make a Solid File Backup on Mac, highlighting: “You can easily do without backing up a huge number of files: applications from Mac App Store and other programs available for download on the network, applications for iOS. Also, you can skip backing up your email if you use IMAP mail or a Gmail account. On these mail services, messages are stored on a remote server, so you can open your messages on the network. The question of information security and data confidentiality on such services remains open. Also, you can skip backing up your music files if you are using. Of course, the backup provides a much higher speed of data recovery in the event of a fatal error, but to save time and relatively quickly perform the operation, you can make a superficial backup of files.
The most important files, which should be backed up without fail, are text documents in Word, photos, home videos. Of course, if you want to make a deeper backup of your Mac device, check out other backup plans. We will concentrate on the most simple solutionsavailable for every user, even a beginner.
Backup with Dropbox is the easiest solution
Download Dropbox from dropbox.com, install the program. If all went well, the Dropbox folder will appear in the main user directory of the device, as well as in the sidebar of the search box.
After downloading the program, you will be given up to 2 GB of disk space for free. If you have few backup files at your disposal, that's more than enough. If you need additional space, you will have to pay $ 99 per year. Move important documents and photos to your Dropbox folder, and the service will automatically synchronize them with a remote server.
Installation Dropbox and uploading important information to the server takes a few minutes. But if you don't mind spending a little time and money, there are other ways to make a more thorough data backup on your Mac device.
Next simple solution: Time Machine
You probably know about free program Time machine for Mac, allowing you to back up your data. But if you've never configured Time Machine, it's unlikely to come to your aid. But if you configure the program correctly, it will take very little time for the backup.
The plan is as follows:
1. Buy another hard drive. For less than $ 100, you get at least a terabyte of disk space. Consider Mac drives when buying, and Thunderbolt drives are faster.
2. Connect the drive to the device.
The system will ask you if you want to use the new disk for backup with Time Machine, after your consent, the data will be backed up to the new disk. This procedure is very effective and most painless. If you have purchased a large disk, you can be sure that your data is safe, just in case. The program saves information, and if you have already changed the file, you can always return to it old versionif the need arises. Also, if you accidentally deleted a file, you can restore it at any time.
The advantage of Time Machine is the ability of the program to make regular data backups, even if the files are updated by the user. As soon as this happens, a new backup is automatically started. In the event of a fatal error, the program provides a backup up to a minute of the previously unforeseen situation. And unlike Dropbox, Time Machine copies everything to another drive, and you don't need to check if all the files have been moved to the backup folder.
Time Machine can also be used to back up files to remote network drives.
Of course, working with Time Machine involves purchasing an additional hard drive and regularly synchronizing it with the program. But there is another opportunity to do backup files, and this does not require additional hardware, but only a monthly or annual subscription and Internet access. It:
CrashPlan
This program has already become popular with many users. A subscription to CrashPlan costs only $ 3 per month, thanks to it you can make a backup of information on one computer; for $ 6 per month, you can back up data on 10 personal computers. These prices are subject to a one-time payment for a period of 4 years, but if you intend to pay monthly, then this service will cost a little more.
With CrashPlan, you don't need to buy additional hard drives for backups. CrashPlan backs up data over the Internet, which eliminates the possibility of a one-time error.
All you need to do is subscribe to CrashPlan, choose a plan, download the corresponding software, and wait. The program will automatically back up files via the worldwide network to the CrashPlan servers. You can launch the application and see the progress of the copy, or just leave the program closed and it will quietly do its job.
Also CrashPlan will notify you by e-mail or on Twitter about the status of backups, and in case there is no backup for several days. If you need to recover a file, you can easily do it through the CrashPlan app or website. Like Time Machine, CrashPlan backs up multiple versions of files, so you can access earlier versions of files when needed. The same applies to files that you have deleted. The service provides almost unlimited data backup options for a reasonable price.
Bootable backup
But none of these systems, Dropbox, Time Machine, or CrashPlan, are designed to run a bootable backup. This means that you won't start your Mac if your hard drive fails. But this problem can be solved thanks to Lion's emergency mode.
If you use Snow Leopard, or Recovery Mode is not suitable for you, but still want to make the backup bootable, SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner are the most suitable tools for this. But working with them requires more attention and effort.
Make sure your backups are working
It is very good that in the end you decided to do backup data. But how can you check if it will work in an emergency? After all, you must agree that losing valuable data is a big disappointment, which is very difficult to cope with. And if there are no duplicate files on disks or flash drives, this frustration intensifies and becomes doubly unpleasant. That is why Macworld journalist Adam Engst even suggested celebrating the International Day for Checking Backups. And we have to agree that this is a very good idea. This year the day falls on January 13th.
Checking the backup is simple: find a couple of important files, make sure you can successfully restore them in the event of a fatal error, and open those files.
After all, if the backup is inoperable, consider that it is not. Checking will help you sleep well at night without worrying about the safety of your data.
Enjoy the beginning of the New Year and the realization of your goals
If you started new Year from the fact that you have pleased yourself with the confidence in the safety of important information, you can consider that a good start has been made for the better. After all, you will spend very little time on backup, and the result is worth it. A good start is half the battle.
Not all Mac users have bothered to back up their data. Even the presence of a simple standard Time Machine utility in macOS does not motivate you to configure the creation of backups.
It turns out in the desktop operating system Apple has another not the most obvious way to create data backups. It is based on a combination of two features of the iCloud cloud service.
One of them was the ability to synchronize data from the desktop and the Documents folder between computers. It was she who formed the basis of this method.
How to setup
The method will work on any Mac computer. It is enough to do the following settings:
1. You need to make sure that the computer is connected account Apple ID ( Tinctures - iCloud).
2. In the parameters, enable the option Folders "Desktop" and "Documents".
That's all, nothing else is needed.
How it works
We just place the file on the desktop and wait for the cloud sync to complete (the corresponding indicators in the Finder will disappear). 
Any data that was uploaded to the cloud will be available from any device, and if you accidentally delete something unnecessary, you can restore files from the backup.
We remember another feature of the cloud service -. If you need a copy of the data, do the following:
1. We go to iCloud via the web interface.
2. Go to Settings and open the file recovery section.
3. We select the required data and restore it.
What are the limitations
The main limitation is 5 GB of free space in the cloud. When the file is copied to the desktop, its size should not exceed the remaining free space in iCloud.
If there is not enough space, you can either purchase it. This is not necessary, for small files, photos or documents, there will be enough space.
The second limitation is the 30-day retention period for iCloud backups. After a month, the file that was deleted from the Mac will be permanently deleted from the iCloud backup.
Thanks to re: Store for an interesting feature!
It is easier to answer the question of how to make a backup on Mac OS X than to the question, why do you need a system backup at all. Although, why you need to make backups, it becomes obvious if you accidentally delete all your documents, photos and music with movies during a reinstallation of the system a couple of times or damage the files of a project that you have been working on for a couple of months.
And if you know that everything can be fixed in ten minutes by connecting an external drive with a backup, then life becomes much easier. And in general, you feel much more confident when you know that you can always return important data.
And for creating backups in Mac OS X there is a built-in tool - Time Machine. When I started using it, I had a lot of questions, so I decided to collect the answers to them in one place, in this article.
How to make a backup on a Mac
Actually, it's pretty simple: you just take an external hard drive, attach it to your Mac, and it should ask you if you want to use that drive for Time Machine backups.
An important tip to give here: do your first backup in the evening, because the first time the process can take overnight, especially if you have a lot of data on disk.
Time Machine FAQs
How does Time Machine work?
When Time Machine makes the first backup, it copies all data hard diskexcept for the contents of the recycle bin and some system files. Then, on the disk where the backup is stored, a folder is created with the date of the backup in the name:
/Volumes/Backup/Backups.backupdb/ixrevo's Mac / 2013-05-28-010212 /
When creating subsequent backups, only those files are copied that have changed since the first backup was created, and for unchanged files, hard links to these files are created in previous backups. If none of the files in any directory has been changed, then a hard link is created only to this directory.
Thus, the backup in Time Machine is incremental, which means that during the creation of a new backup, only changed files are copied, which helps to significantly reduce the disk space required for storing the backup.
What do you need to start making backups in Time Machine?
Requires a Mac and an external hard drive or Time Capsule.
The Airport Time Capsule is a Wi-Fi hotspot combined with a hard drive.
An external hard drive can have any interface (USB, FireWire, Thunderbolt, eSATA), but the faster the better, of course, so when choosing a drive for Time Machine, I settled on USB 3.0, because it gives advantages in compatibility due to for the widespread use of USB, as well as the high speed of the third version of this interface.
In this case, the external drive must be formatted to use one of the types file system ... I myself, as advised by Apple, formatted it to Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
How much hard disk space does Time Machine need?
Simple answer - 2TB will be enough, but 3TB is for sure. It depends on the amount of data on your Mac's disk and on how often this data changes (for example, editing several video projects of several gigabytes each can be attributed to frequent data changes). If you multiply the amount of data on your disk by 3, you get the minimum disk size needed for a backup.
If you have a 512 GB disk and 350 GB of them are occupied, then a 1 TB disk should be enough. But this is not an absolute minimum, because if you do not often change your data and you do not need to have backups for every day, then it is quite possible to get by with a factor of 1.5, that is, multiply the amount of data by 1.5 (350 GB x 1.5 \u003d 525 GB). In any case, such a backup is much better than no backup at all.
For example, my MacBook Pro has a 751 GB disk, of which just over 300 GB is occupied by data.
For backups, I use a 2TB external drive, and the Time Machine backups are 450GB. I make backups several times a week.
What happens when Time Machine runs out of disk space?
It's very simple - Time Machine will start deleting the oldest backups.
What is the schedule for Time Machine to back up?
Time Machine creates a backup every hour if the backup disk is connected to the Mac. If the disk for backups is not connected, then when the function of creating local snapshots is enabled (on MacBooks it is enabled together with Time Machine), local backups are also created every hour.
You can start creating a backup copy manually, but besides this, you cannot change the schedule in any way and it is better not to try to do this by editing system filesbecause if you break the backup, then it can have very sad consequences.
As the backups accumulate, Time Machine begins to "compress" them, leaving only:
- hourly backups for the last 24 hours,
- daily backups for the last month,
- monthly backups for previous months, as long as space allows.
What kind of data is backed up?
All data from all internal drives on your Mac that have any of the file system types are saved. Therefore, for example, the Boot Camp partition, like any other Windows or Linux formatted partitions, will not be included in the backup. Also, data on external and network drives cannot be backed up.
Can I use a Time Machine drive to store something else?
Time Machine will not delete any other data that you put on the drive used for backup. Just keep in mind that storing important data on the disk used for backups can be dangerous if you do not back up this data elsewhere.
You also need to understand that the more disk space is used, the less space will be left for backups.
Can I use a Time Machine drive that already contains other data?
If the disk has the correct partition formatting required by Time Machine, then this may well work. But I would suggest that you temporarily save the old data from the drive you want to use somewhere else, just in case.
Can I use a disk to back up multiple computers?
Yes, there are no restrictions here, except for one very important one: the amount of free disk space for backups. Each computer will require a certain amount of free space for backup, which we discussed a little earlier in the article.
How do I reduce the size of Time Machine backups?
The easiest and most effective way to reduce the size of your backups is to exclude files that take up a lot of space and have little value.
Everyone knows that it is necessary to take care of the safety of data on a computer in advance. Most users understand this, but not always react. The reason may be both laziness and lack of experience in a bitter situation in which information can no longer be returned. In order not to become a hostage of an unpleasant situation, we suggest that you familiarize yourself with a convenient tool Arq for OS X and Windows, which knows a lot about backups.
If OS X users have a utility that does a good job of backing up, then Windows PC owners do not have standard tools for backing up data at all. Time Machine is also not ideal, and depending on the amount of information, a backup can take from several hundred megabytes to a couple of gigabytes, and you need a second media for copying. But we live in a wonderful time when all important information can and should be stored in the cloud. So why not back up important data on it? The Arq program is ready to help with the solution of this issue.
Thanks to Arq, you can set up a backup of one or several folders in just a few clicks. True, there is no possibility to add the entire system disk entirely, and you will not be able to restore the system either, but the selected folders with important files will always be in a safe place.
Speaking of place, Arq supports several popular cloud storage like Microsoft OneDrive, DropBox, Google drive or even your own SFTP server. Of course, domestic services like Yandex.Disk or Mail.ru, and the same MEGA with free 50 GB is not enough. You cannot customize them selectively either. So either we get used to the available amount of free gigabytes on the storages available in the program's list, or we purchase tariff plan with an expanded number of gigabytes.
The cool thing is that Arq allows you to add multiple storages, to which you can back up both different and the same data, for increased security. By the way, all data backups are encrypted, and the information is transmitted over secure SSL / TLS channels.
The program for the first time performs a full copy of data from the selected folders, and only later sends only changed information, which greatly saves traffic.
By default, a new backup is created every hour and we cannot increase or decrease the number of backups. The only options available are limiting the data rate and “ Pause»For a specified time, accessible through the icon in the menu bar.
Each copy is displayed as a history, so that both all deleted / lost files and selected files can be recovered.
No more bells and whistles, and perhaps not necessary. Communication with the application is reduced to adding cloud storage and folders for backup. The rest of the time Arq will quietly (do not forget to turn off notifications on Mac) will do its job.
The program can be bought both once and for all for $ 40 (cloud storage rates are completely the responsibility of the user), and by subscription - $ 10 a month, but in this case you will have the opportunity to access 250 GB of storage and receive up-to-date updates. For small companies, the "Arq Business" tariff plan is suitable - 5 TB in the cloud, remote access, extended support and all program updates.
P.S .: Minimum system requirements - availability of OS X 10.7 and Windows 7 or newer versions.
