Time Machine → macup

Switching from Time Machine to macup.

Add macup alongside Time Machine without giving up your safety net. Parallel-run for two weeks, verify a restore, then shelve the Time Machine drive.

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Migration checklist

8 steps. Your pace.

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Force a final Time Machine backup
Open System Settings, choose General, then Time Machine. Click Back Up Now and wait for the run to finish and the menubar spinner to stop. This gives you a fresh local snapshot to fall back on while you set macup up in parallel.
Install macup and set your recovery key
Download the DMG from macup.app, drag macup into Applications, and launch it. Sign in, then follow the recovery-setup wizard: create a passphrase you will remember, download the recovery code, and store it somewhere outside this Mac. Your passphrase wraps the AES-256 keys on-device, so we cannot reset it for you.
Pick a destination
In the menubar app, open Destinations and add one. macup Cloud is the managed tier with ransomware-resistant Object Lock and no egress fees. BYOS points macup at an S3-compatible bucket, a NAS, or an external drive for five dollars per month per device. You can run up to three destinations at once, so you do not have to choose just one.
Mirror the default Time Machine set
Create a backup set called Home and include Documents, Desktop, Pictures, Movies, Music, and Downloads. Time Machine backs up almost the whole disk by default, but most of that is rebuildable system state. Matching the user-data folders gets you every file you actually care about without the noise.
Port your Time Machine exclusions
Open System Settings, Time Machine, Options, and note every path in the excluded list. Add each one to the Exclusions tab on your new macup backup set. Common ones: VM disk images, large caches, and any scratch folder you deliberately kept out.
Run both tools in parallel for two weeks
Leave Time Machine plugged in and scheduled. Let macup run continuously alongside it. Two weeks gives you enough snapshots in macup to trust the pipeline and enough real-world edits to compare the two histories.
Verify with a test restore
Pick a file whose contents you know by heart: a recent invoice, a contract, a photo you edited yesterday. In the macup dashboard, open Restore, find it, and restore to a scratch folder on your Desktop. Diff it against the original with the Finder Get Info size and a quick open. Byte-identical is the bar.
Keep the Time Machine drive as a cold archive
Once you have done a successful test restore and two weeks have passed, stop the Time Machine schedule in System Settings but do not erase the drive. Label it with the date and shelf it. It is now a frozen snapshot of your Mac as it was on migration day, which is a useful thing to have if you ever need to reach back past macup's retention window.

Known gotchas

Things to watch for.

Specific to migrating from Time Machine — small issues that trip most people up.

Do not point macup at the Time Machine drive

The Backups.backupdb bundle on a Time Machine disk is a live hard-link forest that macup should not try to snapshot. Exclude the drive from every macup backup set, even if you plan to reuse it later as a BYOS destination.

External drives need to be mounted for macup to back up files on them

If Time Machine was backing up files that live on an external drive, macup can only capture those files while that drive is mounted. Either leave the drive connected, or add the folder to a separate backup set flagged Only When Mounted so macup does not alarm when it is unplugged.

System and Applications folders are intentionally skipped

Time Machine captures the full system for bare-metal restore. macup does not, because a signed macOS install plus your user data is a faster and safer rebuild path on Apple Silicon. If you rely on Time Machine's Migration Assistant flow, keep the final Time Machine drive as your one-time restore source.

The recovery code is the only way back in

If you forget your passphrase and have not saved the recovery code, your encrypted data is unrecoverable by design. Print the code or store it in your password manager before you start seeding a destination.

Ready to switch from Time Machine?

30 days free. No card. Run both tools in parallel until you're sure.

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