Take Control of Backing Up Your Mac, 5th Edition

Choose Backup Hardware

Depending on what you decided in Choose Local or Network Backups, you’re likely going to need one or more external hard drives or SSDs for your backups. (Even if you use network storage or a cloud backup service, you’ll need a separate external drive if you want to store a bootable duplicate.) You can find hard drives and SSDs with every imaginable combination of capacity, speed, interface, and case design—as well as devices that incorporate more than one hard drive or SSD in a single unit—and the selection changes constantly.

In this chapter, I start by addressing the increasingly important question of hard drives versus SSDs. Then I walk you through the calculations of how much storage capacity you’ll need for backups ...