Storage Studio and Time Machine

Time Machine and Storage Studio's Data Backup both keep earlier versions of your files, but they protect different things. They're designed to work side by side, and using both is the safest choice.

What Time Machine does

Time Machine is built into macOS. It backs up your files, apps and settings to a backup disk. It keeps hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month and weekly backups for older months, removing the oldest when the disk fills. It also keeps local snapshots on your Mac's own disk, so recent versions are at hand even when the backup disk isn't connected.

What Data Backup adds

• The folders you choose, wherever they are — including folders you've moved to your external drive. Time Machine backs up a shortcut as a shortcut, not the folder it points to, so a folder Storage Studio has relocated needs its own backup on the drive side.
• Where you want it: another drive, a folder, or one of your cloud accounts, where backups are encrypted on your Mac before they leave it.
• When you want it: As things change, On a schedule or Only when I ask.
• Incremental versions you can browse file by file or restore whole, and a Check button that verifies a backup's integrity.

%% caption: What each backup covers
flowchart LR
  A[Your Mac's built-in disk] -->|Files, apps and settings| TM[Time Machine]
  B[Folders moved to your external drive] -->|Folders you choose| DB[Data Backup]
  A -->|Folders you choose| DB
  TM --> C[Time Machine backup disk]
  DB --> D[Another drive or a cloud account]

Local snapshots

Time Machine's local snapshots are useful, but they hold on to the space of files you've since moved or deleted. Storage Studio's Local Snapshots window shows how much they're holding, tells you whether a Time Machine backup exists, and lets you release space when you need it. If no Time Machine backup is set up, it warns you that the snapshots are the only copy of that state.

Using both

Keep Time Machine for your Mac as a whole. Add a Data Backup set for anything that lives on your external drive. Check Time Machine's options to see which drives it includes.

See also: Data Backup · Local snapshots · Where a backup can go