Hard Drive Mirroring Time Machine is a great tool for Mac backup, but its not as powerful as making a mirror image or copy of the entire hard drive.

Apple includes a couple of tools within OS X that help with Mac backup, but users may want to consider some third-party tools as well.

These include Time Machine, which Apple builds into every Mac with OS X.

Best Cloud Backup 2015 Manual Backup Or

Users can also backup selective data with things like iCloud, manual backup or file syncing services.

Third parties also offer complete and partial backup solutions.

A few of these solutions will include opening System Preferences.

To do this, do one of the following: Click on the Apple icon button in the upper left corner of the screen and choose System Preferences.

Click on the gray and black gear icon from the Dock (on the right end by default).

To make sure youre selecting the right one hover over the icons till the label System Preferences pops up over the mouse cursor.

Use the keyboard shortcut COMMAND SPACE and type Sys then hit Enter.

That equates to 3 copies of your data on at least 2 kinds of media with at least 1 offsite backup.

The three copies will include the one on the computer, one on the local backup media and one in offsite backup like the cloud or a drive that you put at another place.

Time Machine Apple includes Time Machine as part of OS X making it possibly the simplest Mac backup option.

The utility backs up everything on the Mac to the external drive so that users can get their files back if they lose them or if the computer stops working, gets lost or stolen.

To summarize, follow these steps: Open OS X System Preferences using the steps above.

Click on Select Disk to choose the external drive you wish to use for backup and then OK to close the dialog box.

Apple sells two sizes (300 for a 2TB option and 400 for a 3TB Time Capsule).

The Time Capsule includes a hard drive and a network router with Wi-Fi and Ethernet.

Theyre simple to set up but dont offer as many features as most modern routers, most of which transfer data faster than Apples Time Capsule.

Since Time Machine doesnt offer an offsite option, use one of the following as well.

GottaBeMobile offers a great guide for using iCloud on Mac and iPhone, but well focus on OS X and Mac backup.

The article in the link above explains each of them in detail.

Best Cloud Backup 2015 Free ICloud Storage

Every Apple user account comes with at least 5GB of free iCloud storage, but that will fill up quickly if the user plans to use it for things like photos or other media files.

If you plan to use iCloud for all of your files and data, then consider buying more storage.

It costs 2.99month for 200GB or 9.99month for 1TB.

Click on Manage in the lower right corner.

Best Cloud Backup For Mac 2015