For example, they don't remember the local coffee shop's complicated Wi-Fi password or every setting you've changed that's finally made booting your Mac feel as familiar as sinking into a comfy couch.Īpple makes backing up relatively painless by including its Time Machine app in the Mac operating system, which you can schedule to run a full backup of your Mac. But cloud drives can't back up everything on your computer. With so many cloud storage services available that can automatically sync your files, such as Dropbox or Google Drive, it's easy to just set it and forget it. A backup also makes it easy to move your apps and data to a new Mac if you upgrade to a new machine, like the newly announced Mac Studio desktop or the rumored M2 MacBook Pro.

But if your MacBook or iMac crashes at an inopportune time - as computers always seem to do - you'll be infinitely grateful you took a few minutes to save all your important files.

Backing up your Mac is one of those routine tasks that can wind up buried beneath the more urgent priorities on your to-do list.

How to backup my mac to icloud drive