Make your Mac Ventura–ready and keep your files safe

WRITTEN BY CARRIE MARSHALL

APPLE’S HOMAGE TO its home state continues, with macOS Ventura due for release this fall. As the next version of macOS is getting closer, it’s a great time to get your system ship–shape, your storage streamlined and your Mac Ventura–ready.

Just as in real life, we all know that we should strive to stay on top of our Mac housekeeping — but as in real life, it’s often tempting just to skip it, just this once, because we’ll totally catch up next week. Or the week after. Or the week after that. Before long you’ve got a cupboard full of spiders, a chair barely visible under a pile of clean laundry or a Mac that’s full of unwanted apps, duplicate photos and remnants of long–deleted documents.

That doesn’t just look bad. It’s inefficient too. It can mean frantically trying to free up space because an app or macOS update doesn’t have room to install. It can mean spending ages trying to track down that important thing when you need it in a hurry. And it can mean discovering at the worst possible time that the document, file or photo you’re looking for has been lost or damaged. That last one is why we’re also looking at another kind of housekeeping: backing up. macOS and third–party apps can make backing up your irreplaceable photos, videos and other important data completely automatic and utterly effortless. Backups have saved us from catastrophes on endless occasions, and there are lots of really effective options ranging from free tools that come with your macOS to affordable but extremely comprehensive backups for businesses.

Whether you’re new to Macs or just need a bit of motivation, this guide will show you how to digitally dust, virtually vacuum and metaphorically mop your Mac.

Why backups matter

Because there’s nothing worse than losing all your stuff

WHETHER YOUR MAC’S been stolen, splashed with a cup of coffee or driven off a cliff in a clown car, having all your stuff go “Whizz! Bam! Pow!” is heartbreaking, devastating and likely to make you a little angry. Don’t let it happen!

The more digital our lives become, the more important it is to protect our data; it’s our memories, our videos of the kids’ first steps or the day we brought the dog home for the first time, our wedding photos and the photos of people we’ve loved and sometimes lost. As awful as losing your Mac would be, losing the memories that live on it would be absolutely devastating.

But we have iCloud! Well, yes, we do. But iCloud is not a backup service. It’s a file sharing and synchronization service, and that means if something such as a video gets damaged or deleted on one device it’ll be damaged or deleted across all your other devices too. iCloud does keep a recently deleted folder for files and one for photos, so you’ve got 30 days to notice and restore the missing file or photo, but it’s not something you should rely upon.

INCREMENTAL BACKUPS

The best backups happen regularly, are stored on different devices and/or in different premises and are incremental — so you do one massive backup at the beginning, and in future the software only backs up the bits that have been added since. That means you have a backup of everything without eating up online, SSD or hard drive space; for example, our Time Machine backup of absolutely everything on one of the office Macs goes back 124 weeks and still only takes up just over 1TB of data — which sounds like a lot but that’s for 124 backups of a Mac with 260GB on it. If those backups weren’t incremental, we’d need a drive with 32TB of storage space, which currently costs about $1,600.

BACKUP CHECKLIST

Backups are like insurance; you hope you’ll never have your Mac stolen or have the kids accidentally break the TV but, if disaster happens, you’ll be glad you paid the premium. Where backups differ is that when you break a television, you can get a similar one; you can’t do that with your photos or the book you’re writing. Use Time Machine or backup software to make multiple backups.