Why Cloud Storage Isn’t a Backup
Many people assume that storing files in iCloud Drive, Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, or OneDrive means those files are backed up. After all, the files exist on remote servers maintained by large companies with professional IT teams and redundant storage. But that doesn’t mean they are backed up.
Cloud storage is tremendously useful and can play a valuable role in recovering from disasters, but it is not a backup. Understanding the difference could save you from a devastating data loss.
What Makes a Backup a Backup?
A true backup creates a separate copy of your files through a process that’s distinct from your normal saving. With cloud storage, saving is syncing—the moment you save a file (or it auto-saves), that exact version propagates everywhere. There’s no separate copy, just one file that exists in multiple places simultaneously.
With a real backup system like Time Machine, backing up is an independent operation. You work on your file, saving changes as you go, and separately, on its own schedule, Time Machine backs up that file. If something happens to that file at 2 PM, you can still recover it from the 1 PM backup.
Risks Not Mitigated by Cloud Storage
Why might you need a real backup? Computers and apps are significantly more reliable than they used to be, but they’re not perfect. Plus, human error is always a risk, and you can never discount the possibility of unexpected events.
Cloud storage won’t fully protect you from these scenarios:
- Inadvertent deletion: It’s all too easy to delete important files or folders. With cloud storage, those deletions are synced across all your devices and the cloud. (Though hopefully you can pull them out of the trash—never empty it immediately after deleting files.)
- Accidental changes: A misbehaving app could corrupt data in an important file, or, more likely, you could change or delete data within the file that you later decide was a mistake. With cloud storage, those changes sync instantly, making it difficult or impossible to revert.
- Account compromise: Cloud storage is protected only by your password. If you don’t use a strong, unique password, an online thief could use it to access your account and delete or encrypt your files.
- Account problems: Even if an attacker doesn’t compromise your account, if you lose the password, have billing issues, or do something that the provider considers a terms-of-service violation, you could be locked out of your account and all your files.
- Ransomware: If malware encrypts all your files, those encrypted files will be synced to the cloud and become unrecoverable everywhere. Ransomware isn’t a significant problem on the Mac today, but that could change at any time.
How to Back Up Cloud Storage Files
The solution to these problems is not to stop using cloud storage, but to back up your cloud storage files just like you back up everything else. However, there are two things to keep in mind when backing up cloud storage.
First, verify that the local copies of your cloud storage files are being backed up. By default, the local versions of cloud-based files are stored in ~/Library/CloudStorage/ for everything but iCloud Drive, which puts files in the hidden folder ~/Library/Mobile Documents/. Time Machine automatically backs up your entire user folder, including cloud storage folders, but other backup apps may exclude them.
Second, cloud storage services can optionally store data only in the cloud to save local disk space, showing just placeholder icons on your Mac. These cloud-only files won’t be backed up by Time Machine or most other backup apps, though Carbon Copy Cloner can download them, back them up, and then evict the local data to save space.
How do you ensure cloud storage files are also kept locally? All cloud services offer an option to Control-click a folder or file and choose a command like Keep Downloaded, Make Available Offline, or Always Keep on This Device. That works, but requires manual intervention.
For all the major cloud storage services other than Box, you can also set a preference to keep files locally at all times:
- iCloud Drive: Turn off System Settings > Your Name > iCloud > iCloud Drive > Optimize Mac Storage.
- Dropbox: Click the Dropbox icon in the menu bar and then, in Dropbox > Account > Preferences > Sync, choose Available Offline for the Default Sync Preference. Note that this applies only to new files!
- Google Drive: Click the Google Drive icon in the menu bar, click the gear menu, choose Preferences, click Google Drive, and select Mirror Files for the My Drive syncing options.
- OneDrive: Click the OneDrive icon in the menu bar, click More, click Preferences, and in the Preferences screen, make sure Files On-Demand is turned off.
What About Version History?
Most cloud storage services other than iCloud Drive offer version history, allowing you to restore previous versions of changed or deleted files. Version history provides a safety net against inadvertent deletions or modifications, but it’s not a substitute for comprehensive backups. It has two notable limitations:
- Time: Version history is typically limited to 30–180 days, depending on your plan. You might not realize you need a deleted file or that your database has become corrupted until after that window closes.
- Trouble: Restoring many files from version history can be tedious compared to restoring from a proper backup. It might be fine for a file or two, but recovering from a more significant disaster might be difficult.
The Real Value of Cloud Storage
None of this means cloud storage is useless for disaster recovery. If your Mac fails, is stolen, or is destroyed in a fire, you can access all your cloud storage files as soon as you sign in to your account from a new or repaired Mac. You can even get to them from an iPhone or iPad. That also applies to Web apps like Google Docs, where data is never stored locally.
But cloud storage won’t protect against accidental deletion, file corruption, ransomware, or account issues. For that, you need separate, independent backups of all your files—including those stored in the cloud.
Apple’s Focus Is Powerful but Unpredictable
Sometimes you just don’t want your phone to ring, chirp, or even vibrate. Maybe you’re asleep, in an important meeting, having dinner with family, meditating, playing a game, or simply enjoying some quiet time.
Apple’s Focus feature on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac can silence those interruptions, but Focus is considerably more complex than the straightforward Do Not Disturb feature it replaced in 2021. Misconfiguring Focus such that it activates unexpectedly can cause you to miss important calls, messages, and other notifications.
What Focus Does
Focus lets you create customized notification environments that block unwanted interruptions while allowing important ones through. You can have a Focus for different situations—when you’re at work, eating dinner, at the gym, and more—each with its own rules about when it activates and which people and apps can reach you.
When a Focus is active, it can:
- Silence notifications from selected people and apps
- Allow specific people and apps to break through
- Change your Lock Screen appearance
- Hide certain Home Screen pages
- Automatically reply to messages explaining you’re unavailable
- Filter content in apps like Mail, Calendar, and Messages
- Make a certain profile or tab group active in Safari
Focus can share your settings across all your Apple devices, which saves you from having to configure it on each device but can also create confusing interactions.
The Built-In Focus Modes
Apple provides three essential Focus modes that cover most people’s needs:
- Do Not Disturb: A general-purpose Focus for when you need to ensure your iPhone doesn’t interrupt you. It’s ideal for doctor appointments, workouts, movies, and similar situations. You can schedule it, but it’s often best to activate it manually from Control Center for a specific amount of time or until you leave the current location.
- Sleep: This Focus activates according to the Sleep schedule you set on the iPhone (in either Settings > Focus > Sleep or in the Health app) to minimize nighttime interruptions. It lets you choose a specific Lock Screen, Home Screen, and Apple Watch face to limit distractions at night.
- Driving: Automatically activates when your iPhone connects to a car’s Bluetooth system or detects driving motion. (The Bluetooth connection may be best if you’re frequently a passenger and want to use your iPhone while being driven.) It blocks nearly all notifications to keep your attention on the road and can send custom automatic replies to people who text you.
For further customization, you can create additional Focus modes—Apple suggests modes for Gaming, Mindfulness, Personal, Reading, and Work. For instance, if you take a spin class every Tuesday at noon and yoga on Thursdays at 7 AM, you could create a Focus for Working Out that would automatically activate during those times.
Configuring a Focus
To set up a Focus, go to Settings > Focus on your iPhone or iPad, or System Settings > Focus on your Mac. Select the Focus you want to configure or create a new one, then:
- Choose allowed people: Decide whether to allow or silence notifications from specific people. You can also specify whether phone calls from certain groups (Allowed People, Favorites, Contacts, or Contacts groups) can break through.
- Choose allowed apps: Similarly, allow or silence specific apps. You can also enable Time Sensitive Notifications, which lets urgent alerts (like delivery notifications or security alerts) come through even from disallowed apps.
- Set a schedule: Have the Focus turn on at certain times, locations (on when you arrive, off when you leave), or when using specific apps (but not when apps are in the background). App-based triggers are useful for presentations, live performances, and games. A Smart Activation option on the iPhone can automatically turn on a Focus based on your location, app usage, and time of day.
- Add Focus Filters: Customize how Calendar, Mail, Messages, Safari, and others behave when the Focus is active—for example, showing only certain Safari tab groups and your work email accounts during a Professional Focus.
- Intelligent Breakthrough & Silencing: If you have Apple Intelligence enabled, this option “intelligently” allows priority notifications to interrupt you and silences others. It doesn’t override your explicit settings for allowing or silencing notifications.
The Complexity Problem
While Focus is powerful, its complexity can create unpredictable behavior. Here are common pitfalls to avoid:
- Unexpected activation: With automatic schedules based on time, location, and apps, it’s hard to predict when a Focus might turn on. You may not realize notifications are being silenced until you’ve missed something important. This is especially important if your routine is interrupted. Perhaps you normally work out at noon, but today you are at a professional conference or dealing with a family emergency.
- Cross-device confusion: By default, Focus syncs across all your Apple devices via the Share Across Devices option. Syncing means a Focus activated on your iPhone—such as Sleep—might also silence notifications on your Mac when you’re working late and need to communicate with colleagues. Consider turning off Share Across Devices unless you’re certain you want synchronized behavior.
- Unpredictable AI: Focus includes two features that rely on machine learning—Smart Activation and Intelligent Breakthrough & Silencing—to make contextual decisions about when Focus should activate and which notifications are important enough to bypass it. We recommend against using them because they make an already unpredictable scenario even more unpredictable.
- Silenced notifications indicator: When a Focus is active, people who text you in Messages see that your notifications are silenced. While this can be helpful, it can also confuse others when a Focus activates unexpectedly.
- The forgotten Focus: A Focus that activates automatically when you go to a specific location or open a particular app might remain active longer than you expected. For instance, what if a Focus activates when Mail is your frontmost app, but you have to leave unexpectedly and your Mac doesn’t sleep automatically, so Mail remains the active app over the weekend? That might be particularly confusing when a Focus Filter hides certain accounts or data.
Practical Recommendations
To get the benefits of Focus without the confusion:
- Keep it simple: Start with Do Not Disturb, Sleep, and Driving. These three cover the needs of most people and have the most predictable behavior. If you created Focus modes you’re not using, delete them.
- Be conservative with triggers: If you add schedules or triggers based on location or apps, keep them to a minimum. The more triggers you add, the harder it becomes to predict when a Focus will be active.
- Allow more calls: These days, unexpected calls from people you know well are fairly uncommon, and those that do happen are more likely to be important. So consider allowing calls from family and close friends (perhaps via Favorites or a Contacts group) and enabling Allow Repeated Calls, which lets someone through if they call twice within three minutes.
- Check Focus status when troubleshooting: If you or someone you know is missing notifications, check whether a Focus is unexpectedly active. The easiest place to check is Control Center.
- Review Share Across Devices: If you experience unexpected Focus behavior, turn off Share Across Devices and configure each device’s Focus settings independently.
- Control notifications directly: Rather than rely on Focus, limit notifications to just those that are actually important to you. Many apps are unnecessarily chatty.
Focus is a powerful tool for managing the constant stream of notifications from our devices, but it requires careful configuration. When in doubt, keep it simple: Sleep to protect your sleeping hours, Driving to block distractions in the car, and Do Not Disturb for ad hoc appointments and performances may be all you need.
How Does the New MacBook Neo Compare to the MacBook Air?
Apple has unveiled the MacBook Neo, a new entry-level laptop. With pricing starting at $599, a whopping $500 less than the MacBook Air, the MacBook Neo is positioned as an affordable computing option, particularly for families buying devices for K–12 students.
Despite its low price, the MacBook Neo is a Mac, so it works like any other modern Mac, complete with support for Apple Intelligence. A key question is how it compares to the MacBook Air, which Apple just updated with the M5 processor. Unsurprisingly, Apple made numerous compromises to hit the lower price point compared to the $1,099 13-inch MacBook Air. Those compromises may or may not make a difference for your intended usage.
Comparing the Specs
Let’s run through the MacBook Neo’s specs and see how it matches up to the MacBook Air:
- A18 Pro chip: One of the main places Apple cut costs is by relying on an A18 Pro chip with 6 CPU cores and 5 GPU cores, previously used in 2024’s iPhone 16 Pro models. This is the first time Apple has used an iPhone-class chip in a Mac. For everyday tasks in a single app, performance is nearly comparable to the MacBook Air’s M5, which has 10 CPU cores and 8 or 10 GPU cores. However, the MacBook Neo will be significantly slower for multi-threaded tasks such as video editing, code compilation, or heavy multitasking.
- 8 GB unified memory: Another notable difference is that the MacBook Neo has only 8 GB of unified memory, whereas the MacBook Air starts at 16 GB and can be configured with 24 GB or 32 GB. Being limited to 8 GB means the MacBook Neo will struggle with memory-intensive tasks or running many apps at once, but that isn’t likely to be an issue with everyday Web browsing, email, and messaging.
- 256 GB or 512 GB storage: The base MacBook Neo has only 256 GB of storage, which may fill up quickly with photos, videos, and games. For $100 more, you can get 512 GB. In comparison, the MacBook Air starts with 512 GB and can be configured with 1 TB, 2 TB, or 4 TB. You can always buy an external SSD to offload little-used data.
- 13.0-inch Liquid Retina display: The display is another significant difference. The MacBook Neo has a 13.0-inch display that shows slightly less content on screen than the MacBook Air’s 13.6-inch display—imagine losing about a half-inch of space vertically and horizontally. The MacBook Neo also lacks True Tone, which adjusts the display for ambient light conditions, and supports only sRGB color rather than Wide color (P3), so colors will be slightly less vibrant when viewing photos or videos, though this will be unnoticeable in most apps.
- 1080p FaceTime camera: The MacBook Neo’s webcam is several years behind the current 12-megapixel Center Stage camera that debuted with the M4 MacBook Air in 2025. It’s fine, but it is noticeably lower quality and lacks the Center Stage feature that keeps you in the frame as you move around. The MacBook Air’s camera also supports Desk View, which shows items underneath it, but that’s not a commonly used feature.
- Two USB-C ports: Connectivity is another place where the MacBook Neo makes compromises. It offers two USB-C ports, but only the left one supports USB 3 at 10 gigabits per second; the right one supports only USB 2 at 480 megabits per second. You can use the left one for an external drive or a single 4K display; the right one is primarily useful for a keyboard, mouse, or printer. The MacBook Air, in comparison, has two 40 gigabits-per-second Thunderbolt 4 ports and supports up to two 6K displays. The MacBook Neo has to use one of its ports to charge, since it lacks the MagSafe charging port found on the MacBook Air.
- Magic Keyboard: The $599 MacBook Neo has the same Magic Keyboard as the MacBook Air, but lacks keyboard backlighting for typing in the dark and Touch ID for authentication and Apple Pay support. Moving to the $699 model gets you Touch ID along with 512 GB of storage. All MacBook Air models have Touch ID, which is a convenience.
- Multi-Touch Trackpad: The MacBook Neo uses Apple’s much older Multi-Touch trackpad with a physical click mechanism rather than pressure sensors and haptic click simulation in the MacBook Air’s Force Touch trackpad. Few people will miss Force Touch features like pressing deeply on a file in the Finder to open it in Quick Look.
- Dual mics, dual speakers: For audio input and output, the MacBook Neo relies on a dual-mic array and a dual-speaker sound system. It will undoubtedly be fine, but it doesn’t match up to the MacBook Air’s three-mic array and four-speaker sound system. Both have 3.5 mm headphone jacks, or you can just use AirPods.
- Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 6: Although the MacBook Air has slightly newer Wi-Fi 7 support (both have Bluetooth 6), no one in the MacBook Neo’s target audience will notice the difference with Wi-Fi 6E. Few people have Wi-Fi 7 base stations yet anyway.
- Battery life: Apple rates the MacBook Neo at 16 hours of video streaming and 11 hours of “wireless web” use, which qualifies it for “all-day” battery life. It’s respectable and probably sufficient for most situations, but well below the MacBook Air’s 18 and 15 hours on those benchmarks.
- Size and weight: In terms of raw numbers, the MacBook Neo is slightly narrower and shallower than the MacBook Air—about a quarter of an inch— but essentially the same thickness (about half an inch) and weight (2.7 pounds). You wouldn’t notice the difference.
Who Should Consider the MacBook Neo
Apple is clearly aiming the MacBook Neo at specific audiences. Anyone working with a lot of apps at once, doing photo or video editing, playing high-end games, or using a bunch of peripherals will be better suited with the additional processing power, memory, and connectivity of the MacBook Air. And those with even more intensive workflows will gravitate to the MacBook Pro line.
But the MacBook Neo is meant to be a small, cute, and inexpensive laptop. It’s entirely adequate for the kind of schoolwork that most K–12 students do: educational apps, online lessons, writing assignments, creating presentations, and conducting research. Its aluminum enclosure will withstand the rigors of daily student use, and the battery life should be sufficient for a full school day.
It would also be appropriate for budget-conscious adults with minimal computing needs. Many people do little more than browse the Web, check email, stream video, and use basic productivity apps. Those who spend most of their time in a handful of bundled Apple apps don’t need the performance of the MacBook Air.
However, we can’t recommend the MacBook Neo for most college students. Although it could handle basic word processing, Web browsing, and video streaming, college students can’t predict what they may need to do during their time in school, and it’s easy to imagine them needing to edit video, do data analysis, or work with 3D graphics. Plus, the limited port selection may be problematic for students needing to connect to external displays, storage drives, and other peripherals.
Although the same concerns apply to creative and business professionals, the MacBook Neo may be an economical travel laptop for someone who does most of their real work on a Mac mini or Mac Studio at the office. For keeping up with email, managing travel details on websites, and giving presentations, it should be more than sufficient and cheaper than most iPads with keyboards.
Pricing and Availability
The MacBook Neo costs $599 for the 256 GB model with Magic Keyboard (no Touch ID) or $699 for the 512 GB model with Touch ID. For the education market, pricing starts at $499. Both configurations are limited to 8 GB unified memory, and there are no other build-to-order options. It comes in four colors—silver, blush, citrus, and indigo—with color-coordinated keyboards.
