Losing something you spent time working on, or photos that you can't replace, is devastating. You might think this is a problem of the past because of cloud storage services like Apple's own iCloud, but that's not completely true.
For one thing, users sometimes get locked out of their cloud accounts, which makes it impossible to retrieve their files. For another, not everything on your Mac is stored in iCloud. Things like settings, applications, and customizations aren't easy to recover should something happen to your Mac. It's also a lot faster to retrieve files from a local backup than a cloud one, which is important if you're backing up things like videos or photo libraries. Finally, there's a certain peace of mind that comes from being in control of your backup, as opposed to it being

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