2026 is Coming at us Quickly: How to Archive Your Data!

OK, so 2025 is winding down quickly – and it’s been quite a year, at least for me personally!

But more importantly, I’m here to discuss end-of-year archiving, and making sure your valuable data is not only being backed up but also archived. Things you may need, but don’t need eating up storage on your computer – things like taxes and other financial records, data that you may one day need to reference (hopefully no on taxes!).

I’ve described my backup/archiving steps before, but I’ll go over them quickly again, the steps I take to save my valuable data and records.

First of all, my data is synced between my devices using iCloud (part of the Apple Account), which is free (but there are paid tiers) with every Apple device. Because I use a desktop model (Mac mini) in my home office and a MacBook Air when I’m out of the house, it’s perfect to have all my latest revisions of files on both computers. (Dropbox, Google Drive and others can accomplish the same thing.)

But that only SYNCS my data between devices. To back up my data, I use Apple’s Time Machine, which is built into the OS, connected to my desktop computer. (Because the data from my laptop is synced via iCloud to my desktop computer, I don’t need to back up my laptop.) Also, my desktop computer contains data that isn’t synced among my devices – my music library and certain photo libraries, among others. Those are backed up to an external SSD using Time Machine. I don’t use any cloud-based backup systems, such as Carbonite, BackBlaze, iDrive, etc.

However, I also archive data (separate from the Time Machine backups) on an SSD at the end of every December and lock it in my safe. My year end work, personal, and financial files for example. Also, my entire music library, Photos libraries, and other data I need to keep. Better safe than sorry!