90 MACWORLD APRIL 2020
WORKINGMAC CREATE A BACKUP STRATEGYdrives on a regular basis for local backup,
so you always have a store of all your
older data that can’t be destroyed by fire
or other disaster or stolen from your home
or work. (A simpler version is often
summarized as 3-2-1: three copies, two
local, one offsite [go.macworld.com/3cpy].)
When you start amassing terabytes of
data, all of which is precious, you might feel
like you’re outstripping your ability to
manage it, because you’ve added drives
over the years instead of increasing volume
storage. With the current low cost of high-
capacity drives, and you’re starting to fill
their capacity, it’s a good time to swap.
CLONE YOURSELF
Ensure that you have a single drive that
can make a backup each night (or at least
frequently) that’s an exact image of your
startup volume. Use SuperDuper! (go.
macworld.com/sudu) or Carbon Copy
Cloner (go.macworld.com/cbon) to
schedule and handle it. Both are updated
for Catalina.
GO BIG
Figure out your budget, because you
should get two replacement drives of the
same capacity, so you can rotate one
offsite from time to time. For some people,
that will be a 6TB USB 3.0 drive (like a
Seagate Expansion model, $110); for
others, as big as a 12TB drive (such as the
Western Digital Easystore, $250). (Time
Machine automatically manages updating
a Time Machine volume with the latest files
whenever it’s plugged in.)
Some people might decide to switch to
network-attached storage (NAS), a
network-accessible device that can hold
multiple high-capacity drives. It’s typically
used for home networks for having a
central place from which to stream video
that’s been ripped or downloaded from
digital sources. If you’re ready to make
that leap for network-wide video access or
other reasons, some NAS models also
support Time Machine backups or can be
used for straightforward sync or copying
with software like Econ Technologies’s
ChronoSync (go.macworld.com/chrn).
(Consult TechHive’s December 2019
update for NAS recommendations [go.Many network-
attached storage
(NAS) devices
can be used with
Time Machine.