I recorded and published this walk-through video of Apple’s Time Machine backup process way back in 2015. The cool thing about the process is that it’s so simple to setup and use, that I didn’t even need to record a new video to update said process.
Time Machine is $free.99 and is included with every Mac. All you need is an external Hard Drive with enough space (Peep my Hard Drive recommendation below). Overall, it just works…
The above backup process stores a copy to an external Hard Drive that you keep on hand just in case something happens to your Mac. The only problem with this is the “worse case scenario” where BOTH your Mac and your external Hard Drive is damaged, lost, or stolen. Or in my case, you have a different (and very important) external Hard Drive that can’t be backed up via Time Machine.
With any of those cases, you need to create an additional off-site (remote) backup that you can access if the worse-case scenario becomes a reality…Like it was for me. To solve that potential problem, I recommend BackBlaze to backup your files to the cloud. Check out this video I did outlining how BackBlaze saved my ass
I don’t know how important your files are to you, but my files are very important to me. Don’t wait until something happens before you figure out how to restore your data, go ahead and follow my suggestions, and you will be prepared WHEN (not if) your data is gone.