If you’re looking for a simple, convenient, and affordable way to back up your Macbook, you may want to consider using Dropbox. You can use Time Machine to create local backups, back up your Mac to an external hard drive, or even back it up to the cloud. If you're concerned about this possibility of a Time Machine restore overwriting newer Dropbox files, it sounds like excluding your Dropbox folder from Time Machine would be called for, since then the Time Machine restore wouldn't contain those old files and Dropbox would simply bring the restored Mac back to the current state with no fuss.When it comes to backing up your Macbook, there are a lot of different options to choose from. Regardless, I think the issue we were looking at in this article was the loss of a single file, which could be restored either via Time Machine or via Dropbox. But perhaps there's something that prevents that from happening.Īnd if it does, the next approach would be to restore that information from the Dropbox Web site, since if old bad information has somehow replaced new good information, it will be only a single event for each file, and Dropbox's revision history should be sufficient to restore it. I've not tried this, but I would have expected the newer information from the Dropbox Web site to update the older, now-restored information on your Mac. But if you have a Dropbox Pro account with Packrat enabled, or simply aren’t worried about needing to restore a deleted file more than 30 days later, you might prefer to save some space on your Time Machine After more thought, though, I realized there already had been times that I had deleted files from my Dropbox folder that I could have rescued via Time Machine. When I initially discovered my Dropbox files on my Time Machine backup, my first reaction was to exclude the files from my backup. Drag your Dropbox folder from the Finder into that list, or click the plus sign at the bottom and select the Dropbox folder in your home folder. To exclude your Dropbox files from your Time Machine backup, open the Time Machine pane of System Preferences and click the Options button to reveal the “Exclude these Items from Backups” dialog. In fact, both files and folders, plus application packages, can be restored easily.) (An earlier version of this article said that only files, not entire folders, could be restored from Dropbox. On the other hand, since all those files in your Dropbox folder are duplicated on the Dropbox Web site, they can be restored easily in case of accidental deletion or hard drive death, so there’s no inherent need to use space on these files on your Time Machine drive. Plus, Dropbox maintains deleted files for only 30 days unless you pay for a Dropbox Pro account and enable the Packrat add-on in your account settings, so a Time Machine backup could let you restore deleted files after that 30-day period. On the one hand, backing up your Dropbox folder with Time Machine gives you an added layer of confidence that your files in Dropbox are backed up locally, in case something were to go wrong with the Dropbox Web site. Because there’s nothing special about the Dropbox folder itself, it’s part of Time Machine’s backup set by default. Move a file into the Dropbox folder and it’s copied to the Dropbox Web site make a change, and that change automatically propagates to the Dropbox site. It’s important to realize that one of the key aspects of how Dropbox works is that it creates a Dropbox folder in your home folder and then syncs the contents of that folder with the Dropbox Web site. But what may not have occurred to you is that, by default, Time Machine is also backing up the contents of your Dropbox folder. And if you’re a Dropbox user, everything in your Dropbox folder benefits from both the protection of offsite storage and file versioning. If you use Time Machine to back up your Mac, you have the security of automatic backups.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |