Answers...

to commonly asked questions.

Is online backup a good idea?

Scotty,
I am thinking of using an online backup service for my Macs and Windows computers and family phones.  Someone has mentioned iDrive.  Do you have any experience with iDrive or other online backup services?  What is your take on cloud backup services?  Thanks
___________

I'm not a fan of online backup services such as iDrive, BackBlaze, Mozy, Carbonite, or Crashplan. Here are my reasons:

Slows traffic on your home network as it uploads data constantly via your wifi router.
Takes a longer period of time to restore your data if you have a hard drive failure.
Not as easy as time machine to restore the entire contents of a drive.
Permissions on files can be effected. (gets a little technical)
You are constantly paying a fee.

What I do like and trust completely is a physical hard drive connected to your mac using the built in software called Time Machine. Not to be mistaken with Time Capsule which is a wifi router Apple manufacturers. I do not like that product. But the software Time Machine is very good in my opinion and it's very rare that I ever see a failure of any type to retrieve data as long as time machine was running. Leave your drive connected. If you'd like to use an online backup service in addition to time machine then I wouldn't dissuade you. But every person I work with should have a time machine drive connected to their computer at all times. In a perfect world you would have two that you rotate every month. But I realize that may be asking a bit much for people to be expected to go to those lengths.

In addition, using dropbox, google drive, or icloud drive to store documents and iCloud photo library to store your pictures is a great way to double up on backup.


However if online backup services are the only things you'll use then it's better than nothing.
This image is a theme.plist hack