Mac – backup the Time Machine drive to the cloud and restore it to any other drive

backupNetworkrestoretime-machine

I currently backup my Mac to a local Time Machine drive.

I'd like to start periodically backing up that drive to the cloud, using an as of yet unchosen solution.

Once it's backed up to the cloud, can I restore that Time Machine data to any other drive to restore my Mac?

Thanks

Best Answer

Given the rather tricky use of hard-linked directories, access control settings and other special filesystem features I doubt that you will find a cloud storage which supports all this.

Options you may want to consider:

  • copy the whole Time Machine drive into the cloud as an image (requires a lot of bandwidth at least for the initial copy)
  • use rsync to periodically copy your data to a remote (cloud) system

PS: Rsync is a Unix tool included in macOS used to synchronize directories between disks or servers which supports incremental updates and a lot of other nice things. See man rsync for details.

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