This is the most expensive misunderstanding we encounter. Someone deletes a photo album, or a child does, or a phone is stolen with the sync switched off, and the cloud has dutifully mirrored the loss everywhere. The photos are gone from every device simultaneously, which is precisely what sync is designed to do.
Sync keeps your devices identical. Backup keeps history. You need both, and most households have only the first.
The practical difference
- Sync: delete a photo on your phone and it disappears from iCloud, your iPad and your Mac within seconds. Working as designed.
- Backup: delete the same photo and yesterday’s copy still exists, recoverable for months.
- Sync protects against losing a device. Backup protects against losing data — deletion, corruption, ransomware or simply changing your mind.
- Ransomware exposes this brutally: encrypted files sync as encrypted, overwriting the good copies everywhere.
What we set up instead
The old three-copy principle still holds: three copies of anything irreplaceable, on two different types of storage, with one copy somewhere else physically. In a normal home that means the working copy on your device, an external drive at home, and an encrypted cloud backup with version history.
The part almost everyone skips is testing. An untested backup is a hope, not a backup. We have seen backups that had silently failed eleven months earlier, and backups pointed at a folder the customer had stopped using. Whenever we set one up we deliberately restore a file in front of you, and our plans re-test monthly and report the result.
The five-minute check
- Pick a photo from three years ago. Can you produce it right now? If not, it is not backed up.
- Delete a test document, then try to recover yesterday’s version. If you cannot, you have sync and no backup.
- Check the date of your last successful backup. Anything older than a week means it has stopped.
- Ask what happens if your house floods. If every copy is in the house, that is one copy.