It’s designed to be a repository of your digital life, a place to store and back up your photos, personal files, and application data so you never lose anything. Backing up and restoring iOS devices with iCloudĪpple’s iCloud is not an application, but rather an application suite, one that’s directly baked into the framework of nearly all Apple products.Choose the one that's right for you and within your budget.

There are various choices for restoring your Mac from an external backup in macOS Big Sur and macOS Ventura. It is very time-consuming and less efficient than restoring directly from an external hard drive you have sitting right on your desk. You can then select the files and folders you want to restore from your backup menu.īecause you either have to download files from the Internet or send them away for a physical copy, I only recommend using a cloud-based backup service to restore your Mac if you don't already have a local backup on hand. You can launch the remote app on your Mac or visit the company's website. Most programs will have a Restore files tool right in the user interface. All of them will require that you download a backup from their remote servers, though - unless the service offers to send you a physical hard drive that you can use as a backup (Backblaze provides this feature). If you use a cloud-based backup service, like Backblaze or CrashPlan, you can download missing data to restore your Mac.Įach cloud-based backup service is different.

How to back up your Mac to an online backup service (Image credit: Joseph Keller / iMore)

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