 Gene brings us to our first question this week. He says, I've heard you all talk about the importance of backing up our devices. I replaced an old PC with an M2 Mac mini, which is great. Do I need to get a second external drive for the mini for a time machine or do I even need to bother backing up at all? I think I've talked about this, but I got burned many, many years ago with a photo library. And when you get burned, then you learn, you know, my own fault wasn't backing up and lost, you know, precious photos. And so ever since then, I have been fanatical about backup. I follow the philosophy if it's not in three places, it's not really backed up that whole that whole thing. And so I went all in on backup and I've been that way for years and years and years and years. So my personal opinion is yes, you need at least a backup. And I and I've said this on my show, I think time machine, if you're not doing anything else, get a time machine drive. My general rule is to get one double the size of your internal drive because that'll give you enough little history in there. Plug it in. It will ask you the question. Do you want to use this for time machine? You say yes, you are done for that machine. Obviously with time machine, if you're direct connecting, you've got to do it for each machine. It's a little bit more difficult. I have this problem with my family, right? They use laptops. They never plug them in. I have time machine drives with us. Like I have to remind them, have you plugged in your time machine drive recently? Like once a week, plug it in. Like you don't have to get crazy about it like I am. But I think yes, you want a form of backup and how far you take it. That's maybe the other part of this discussion in my opinion. The question is to whether users, we as users need to take any steps that one would call backing up. I'm not convinced we need that anymore. And, you know, your family's scenario with what you described where they all have laptops and so you can't just plug a drive into their machine and expect it to be plugged in again later without pestering your family. That's common for most people now, right? Most computers are laptops. And then we have these other things that are computers called phones and iPads and vision pros, right? And so do they store data on them? Yes. You know, do you back up your phone? I don't know. Do you like you can back up to iCloud? Is that enough? I would say that most people, if you get a Mac or an iPhone out of the box and you set it up, you connect it to iCloud and you use it as default with maybe I say as default. If you use it with document syncing turned on and I don't know if that's the default anymore. No, I think you have to turn it on. I think you have to turn it on. So not default. But if you turn on iCloud document and data syncing, which almost certainly requires a paid iCloud plan to get enough storage to do that. Then I don't like then I think you're fairly well covered. I'm not saying that choosing to add another layer of backup is bad. It's never bad. I do. But that is what most people are doing. And I think that that's enough for most people to be covered in most cases. You could certainly outsmart yourself by saving things outside of your documents or desktop folder, even once you have syncing turned on. It will warn you, though. Your Mac will warn you if you drag a file from your documents folder to somewhere else if it's being synced. It'll say, Hey, do you sure you want to take this off your iCloud drive? Which is good. Yeah. So I lose it if yeah. Yeah. So there are steps to take, but if you're syncing your documents via some syncing service and I know people argue sync is not backup. And I agree with that, but it is a form of like it's another copy of your data until you delete it. So yeah. I that said, I absolutely still make sure I use time machine at least on all of my Macs, including my laptop. So yeah, you know, especially for the valuable data that you cannot replace, you know, I had neighbors that lost all their photos years ago because it was on one hard drive. And I mean, you know, kids photos gone and they didn't have one digital copy of it. No, it does suck. And it's yeah, please, you know, for that data that's like that. Absolutely. Three, two, one. Well, but iCloud photo. Do you need if you have iCloud photo library? Yeah, this is this is fair enough. That was pre iCloud photo. Exactly. I'm wondering does they, you know, does a ransomware get in there and hoes you because it's connected? Yeah, no. So having one that you can disconnect. Well, and you're putting a lot of trust in Apple, right? And not to say that they don't have backups of backups of backups. I mean, right, but you're still relying on a cloud. So if iCloud works one day for whatever reason, you know, they're not a target of them. Yeah, Apple's not a target, but they have it in multiple. I like I trust that they're probably they probably have a robust system enough now where there's they have their own backups. There's multiple locations like they I'm sure the engineers have thought of this. But again, you are putting your faith. Yes. In iCloud 100%. So if you're okay with that and you think that's that's good, then I like I just prefer the my mental even just mentally knowing that they have a copy. I have a copy. So if I screw up, I can use theirs. If they screw up, I can use mine. Like, yep. No, I do the same thing. I do exactly the same thing. I would bet and I suppose owning some Apple stock. I do bet this money. I would bet money that Apple has gone out of their way to ensure that any given users photos will never get comp, get lost or damaged or whatever with iCloud because all it takes is once and then it makes the news and spreads like wildfire and that's it. People like the world doesn't trust Apple with their data anymore and that would be awful. Yeah, but remember Apple the music library thing happened right where yeah iTunes music library worked a bunch of people's like uploaded audio. So it did but but as terrible as that is and that was that was like the most ham fisted thing we've seen Apple do right was that for most people. The audio that they lost was audio that was recoverable in some other way because it was recorded by someone else right. These are songs right whereas your photos you made those there is no other like oh well that sucks that I have to go through this major headache but I can still get that song again. Like I know there were some people that lost original music and that like that's awful but most of the people that were affected by that it was you know songs that were commercially available. So I mean it's but not disaster in convenience not disaster right. Another one that I'll throw out that you know I do I download make sure I on at least one Mac I download all my Apple purchased videos and create a backup of those because those are not guaranteed to be licensed for forever. That's right. People should be aware of that like Apple can make that go away if you still have the file it will still work. But if you don't have a copy of the file and they've removed it from Apple servers you're never getting that file back. Yeah. Yeah. Brian 8944 in our discord at live dot Mac you can dot com shared a very important add on here bit of advice related here and that is test your backups and make sure you know how to restore because a backup is nothing if you can't rest it's not a backup if you can't restore from it and I don't mean that it cannot be restored from that would also call it not a backup but if you don't know how to restore your backup. It is far less valuable to you you don't want to have to call in help in that moment just because you haven't you don't know how to restore from your backup. This is something you can test you can I recommend you do this regularly once every six months go to your backup pretend you need to restore a file go through the motions and every backup is different time machine has their thing where you can answer time machine carbon copy cloner you just mount the drive and look in the folders that you know if you use something like back plays go online restore a file by downloading you know copying it from their system down to yours just have a working knowledge of that restoration process so that when you are in a panic moment you're not panicked about that you're like I know what to do I can I can you know I can do this.