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Comment by wgrover | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone recommend a backup strategy for iCloud? Specifically, my Macs' hard drives aren't big enough for any one computer to store everything locally, so some documents end up living only in iCloud which is clearly asking for trouble. My ideal solution would be to regularly mirror iCloud's contents on my NAS (which is big enough to store everything locally) but I've never seen anyone implement something like that.

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Have a look at SuperDuper![0] (The exclamation mark is part of the software name, as there are some other things with the same name, but the spelling above is correct.)

It’s shareware, and there’s a free trial. It’s fairly priced imo, and I’ve only used the shareware version. The paid version has some decent QoL features including ACL fixup, but I’m not sure how important that is? I usually run Disk Utility to try to fix those myself but I don’t claim to know the specifics of the paid features.

It seems to work fine with NAS volumes that are configured to play nice with Time Machine, but I forget what the specifics entail on that part. The .dmg backup should be more compatible with varied NAS setups; iirc it has something to do with ACLs being writable by macOS and associated software.

I like that it can make bootable clones of disks to other disks. It can also make .dmg backups of folders or disks.

No affiliation, just a happy user. If anyone knows of other software in the space, I’d love to hear about them, especially FOSS options.

[0] https://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescriptio...

The paid version of SuperDuper! can do incremental backups whereas the free version will always do a full backup and take more time. I’d say it’s worth it to pay for it since you get updates for at least a few years for that version. I use the paid version of Carbon Copy Cloner (bombich.com) though.

Thanks for the reply. I don’t know CCC well enough to comment on it other than to say that I hear good things from its users.

What do you like about CCC? I haven’t ever used it, though I have used a few different commercial/paid backup software and services, running on various OSes. I don’t consider myself a backup expert as far as how the software is implemented or anything, but I have experience testing backups produced by various backup softwares in test and production environments for clients and in-house. I’ve also configured and used a few different FOSS and also proprietary NAS softwares/OSes and how they interact with backup sets.

I think I personally prefer backups that are a single or multiple file archives vs cloning files, and that’s why I don’t really consider iCloud a backup at all. Also I have encountered issues where the target filesystem doesn’t support ACLs or file/folder permissions in a compatible way compared to the origin filesystem/OS, leading to… fun times in rabbit holes.

The best advice I could give anyone when it comes to backups is testing the restore functionality; just because a tool tells you that a backup is valid doesn’t necessarily mean it will restore properly, or at all, with the software that produced it or even specialized tools.

What you would do is the reverse. Store all your documents on the NAS, which could be mounted on multiple clients. Then backup the NAS to the cloud.

Yes. Local to Cloud, not Cloud to Local.

As for Photos, I'd do a weekly or monthly export if I did not have the space to store the library locally (I do).

And if you want to use that NAS while you are outside of your house, you could run Tailscale on both client and server, and that would allow you to securely connect to your NAS remotely over the WireGuard encrypted Tailscale connection.

Elcomsoft's Phone Breaker will let you download your entire iCloud as a local archive. Not free or even cheap, but it does work:

https://www.elcomsoft.com/eppb.html

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Absolutely 100% illegal in the EU to force acceptance of third party cookies.

Even though Elcomsoft have a long and storied history, why should people trust their data to the software of a company which already shows such disdain for privacy?

I run this as a container in my nas (unraid).

https://github.com/boredazfcuk/docker-icloudpd

It’s been great for backing up for backing up photos and videos. Haven’t tried any other files though.

Time Machine backs up files in iCloud Drive. (which is what Desktop/Documents is)

But only the downloaded ones I assume, not evicted files?

Pretty sure Macs download everything, but I don't know what happens if there isn't disk space for that.

OP stated he doesn't have enough disk space for everything on one computer. So it would at least be a bit of hassle (i.e. having the backup spread across multiple Time Machine backups.

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