I don’t use either Dropbox or iCloud, but a friend asks, "I am migrating from Dropbox to iCloud for documents and photos. Can anyone give advice if a backup to the backup is needed? A hard drive? Another service?
Apologies in advance if this topic has been covered. I searched TB but didn’t find anything.
Thank you.
Honestly when I did this I just copied from one folder to the other, waited until I was sure that the files had synced up to iCloud, and then deleted from Dropbox. (On a computer, of course.) Of course I had the luxury of enough drive space to hold multiple copies, but on a modern Mac with APFS the file system should clone the files anyway and not take up extra space anyway when you do a copy-and-paste. But if space is an issue (e.g., you don’t download everything locally), I would think just a drag-and-drop from one location to the other will be fine.
As I posted in another thread, I always make sure that I have my sync service files backed up. But I’ve never needed to rely on the backups in a situation like this. (I’ve done multiple moves from one service to another, if I remember right it was Dropbox->OneDrive->Dropbox->Sync.com->iCloud Drive.)
Ditto to @ddmiller Doug’s response. The wrinkle might be if your friend is allowing Dropbox to “save storage space” on the local machine by making some files online-only. But eventually everything should download and become an actual file on the local machine.
I happen to have a large storage device hanging off my iMac where I could easily drag and drop the entire Dropbox directory as an intermediate step. But again, the most important thing is patience and allowing the process to complete. That could take significant time both for the Dropbox-to-storage transfer and the storage-to-iCloud transfer. Personally I’d feel more secure knowing that I had a full, up to date local copy of what I was about to upload, rather than depending on two cloud services to do the right thing.
Thank you Matt and Doug. Sounds like excellent advice, and I’ve forwarded your replies.
The standard answer is yes, because Dropbox and iCloud are synchronisation services, not backups. Consider potential disasters:
If you accidentally (or deliberately) delete a file, the deletion will propagate to the cloud service and any other devices to which it synchronises. The file then becomes difficult to recover and after period of time unrecoverable.
If one of the synchronised devices is subject to a ransomeware attack, all copies of the data become useless.
Something similar could happen due to a software problem causing corruption of files. The corruption gets propagated to all devices.
Does the likelihood and consequences of such things bother you? If they do, you need a backup.
Thank you gilby. I’ve sent along your feedback. I use a different cloud service, and it’s backup-only because I have only one device (I also backup locally with Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner). But I shall certainly remember your comments about synchronization, if I ever get an additional device.
If your friend has the disk space, I would suggest disabling “Optimize Mac Storage” so he or she will have a local copy of all of the files which can be backed up by Time Machine or other backup software.
Yes, excellent! Will do. Thank you Conrad.
I think you might have missed the point. It’s not about having a single vs. multiple devices. It’s about syncing vs. backing up. With your cloud-based solutions you’re doing the former which means that if anything bad happens to your files (even something as harmless as saving a bad change), chances are it will sync up to the cloud and then you could have no good copy left to fall back on (unless you’re certain your cloud-based syncing service also offers complete version control). That’s where the immutable backup comes in. It freezes your work in time at a certain stage so that you always have a previous version to fall back on. TM does this in a very simple hands-off manner, a scheduled SD/CCC backup also accomplishes this plus allows for many other options. Note, these two will only get the job done for you if the “cloud-based” files actually reside as complete files on your Mac (eg. beware iCloud file eviction), as @chirano points out.
Thank you Simon. My cloud backup system, SpiderOak ONE, operates on a historical versioning system like TM and CCC. If a file goes bad on the hard drive, I should have three opportunities to recover the previous version, is that correct?
BTW, my friend says, “Wow, thanks. Very helpful. So from what I understand, they’re talking how to transfer the files, and also suggesting a local backup? Like on the computer, or an external drive? This latter part is what I’m most concerned with.”
Cloud services are pretty tricky these days, in my experience. If your friend is using a Mac and thinking DB or iC are ‘backups’, then, ah, the answer would be ‘yeah, certainly, no doubt about it’ imho. A more detailed view of the friend’s computing situation would be needed for a successful bit of advice.
Still, based on the original post, I would strongly recommend local backups to any important digital data on the Mac, including documents and photos, even if they are sync’d among devices with DB/iC/et al.
That can be as simple as external drives with TM and CCC backups for instance. CCC for example can backup all the user data of a Mac as soon as the external is plugged in, back it up and eject the external. Pretty close to hands off and can be quite fast, done for example as a person is done computing for the day: plug in drive, brush teeth, confirm backup and ejection, go to bed.
Backing up is a huge topic!
If the friend is only using an iPhone/iPad then… yeah still backup DB/iC but I am not sure how that works! I back up those devices to my Mac before backing up the Mac itself!
What I originally got Dropbox for was for sharing files in a book project and as a place to put large files for someone else to upload. I now use iCloud for sharing files between my office desktop MacMini and the MacBook Air my wife and I share around the house or on a trip. Is iCloud usable for sharing large files with other people like Dropbox?
According to this support article from Apple, yes.
Reading it over, it sounds similar in most respects to what I do with Dropbox. I have not yet tried it with an iCloud file, but will need to as I continue migrating from Dropbox.
Apple Mail appears to create an iCloud link when you are sending a large attachment with a message.