Backing up a Mac at university

Hi all,

I will (hopefully!) be starting university this September. I will probably take a MacBook with me. How best should I back this up?

I thought about using Time Machine, but that would require me to connect my Mac to this drive in the evenings, for example, when I'm in my room. Connecting this every evening could lead me to not bother after a while.

Is there any way of backing this up to a remote drive, perhaps?

Hi all,

I will (hopefully!) be starting university this September. I will probably take a MacBook with me. How best should I back this up?

I thought about using Time Machine, but that would require me to connect my Mac to this drive in the evenings, for example, when I'm in my room. Connecting this every evening could lead me to not bother after a while.

Is there any way of backing this up to a remote drive, perhaps?

Hi, you don't need to connect a drive directly to your machine. You could purchase a NAS device (Network attached storage) this could be over wifi or ethernet. I would recommend ethernet. I'd also recommend setting strong username and passwords to prevent others accessing it. Once on the Mac and NAS are on the same network you can configure time machine to backup directly to that. I have a Western Digital NAS (2 disks for redundancy if one fails). My Mac backups every hour for 24 hours then daily back ups for 30 days and then backups spanning more than 30 days will be condensed into weekly backups indefinitely.. if there is not sufficient space then the oldest weekly backup will be removed for the new one.

Time machine works on an incremental basis meaning the first backup will take the longest then any files that have been changed after the initial backup will be uploaded. For me this means my device takes 2-3 minutes to backup everyday.


As mentioned above Office 365 would be another route to take using One Drive. I believe One Drive is free, One Drive for Business is a subscription package. The benefit of this is any documents created in Office can be saved directly to One Drive through the application (As long as the Installation is a newer version) You can also copy/move/save files to your One Drive folder which will then sync to One Drive in the cloud. Your One Drive folder on your Mac has a local copy all your documents etc. When changes are made the One Drive clients syncs them to the cloud. The main benefit of this is you can access your files on almost any device if required.

Hope this helps!

Thanks for your detailed reply!

I would likely be using the university Wi-Fi network and so to connect an NAS drive to their network would not be possible as I wouldn't be allowed.

I think the best way for me to do this would be to use Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive on my Mac. I could write an AppleScript to automatically copy my main folder over to the OneDrive, Google Drive and Dropbox folders every night, which would then automatically sync to their respective servers.