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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

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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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  1. I think Dolly Drive will 'act as' as time machine drive in the cloud. I haven't seen any other services to offer that...
  2. IDrive is able to back-up your time machine drive itself
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I wrote a guide on backing up OS X to a cloud server with Time Machine, so you don't need to rely on 3rd party software or scripting on your Mac.

It relies on OS X's inbuilt VPN features to secure the connection between your Mac and your server, and most of the work (20-30 mins) is in setting up the server side of things.

I'm using it successfully on a poor 1Mbps upstream home connection.

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