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iCloud Time Machine

With the announcement of new iCloud storage tiers this past Wednesday, it has got me thinking about an idea that worked in theory but not in practice until now. The idea of Apple creating a mechanism of cloud backup for the Mac. On the iOS side we have iCloud backup and it works great! Bringing this kind of simple and effective backup to the Mac would be a great benefit to Mac users, especially those users who tend to not backup their data. The current Time Machine is easy to use but still requires extra hardware and I think that could be a barrier to a lot of users, because of cost or perceived complexity. If iCloud Time Machine existed, your data would be backed up from the first time you turned on your computer, with no interaction, and automatically going forward. I use Backblaze and love it, but this kind of service still requires you to make the first move and that is an issue for some. If I could use the same 1TB iCloud storage bucket that I already have, I would definitely like that.

This kind of system is going to be somewhat more difficult on a Mac than it is on iOS due to third party data, but I think this problem is easily overcome. Much like the transition to using iCloud Drive for synching rather than other solutions like Dropbox or WebDAV.

I obviously have no idea if this would be an area that Apple would be interested in entering, but I think everything is in place to make it happen for sure. I look forward to seeing what is coming for us in the apple community as iCloud becomes more of a viable solution.