One backup set covers the common case. But most Macs carry more than one kind of work. A photo library behaves differently from an active Xcode project. A mounted external archive behaves differently from your home folder. Different scopes deserve different cadences.
Why run more than one set
Every backup set answers three questions: what to protect, where to send it, and how often. Change any answer and you have a new set.
A working example. Your active client project lives in ~/Work/acme. You want that continuously backed up to macup Cloud so a corrupted save loses minutes, not hours. Separately, your 4 TB photo archive lives on an external SSD and rarely changes — you want a nightly mirror to a second external drive, and you do not want to pay cloud storage for it. That is two sets. Same Mac, completely different needs.
Step 1 — Open Backup Sets
Go to macup > Preferences > Backup Sets. Click Add set. The new-set sheet opens.
Step 2 — Name the set
Use a name a human will recognise a year from now. Active project — continuous cloud beats Backup Set 2. Names show up in the menubar, in restore pickers, and in your activity log — pick one you will not have to decode later.
Step 3 — Pick the source
Choose what macup protects for this set.
Whole Mac
Protects the full startup volume minus system files macOS rebuilds on restore. Best for your primary protection set.
Home folder
Everything under ~. Good middle ground — your work, your apps’ data, your settings.
A specific folder or drive
Point macup at ~/Work/acme, or at an external archive drive. Sources on removable media get a Only when mounted flag — macup waits for the drive to appear instead of raising an error every time it is unplugged.
Step 4 — Pick the destination
Choose an existing destination or add a new one. A single destination can host many sets — macup Cloud can carry your home folder set and your project set side by side without interference. See the destination articles linked below for setup.
Step 5 — Pick the schedule
Continuous
macup watches filesystem events. When a file changes, it enters the queue. Rounds flush in batches — typically every few minutes under normal load.
Scheduled
Fixed cadence: hourly, daily, weekly, or specific times. Good for large-and-rarely-changing sources where continuous is overkill.
You can mix. A home-folder set on continuous and an archive-drive set on nightly is a perfectly normal combination.
Step 6 — Review exclusions
Exclusions inherit the global list by default. Open Exclusions on the set sheet to override for this set only — useful when one source needs stricter rules (a giant scratch folder) or looser rules (you actually do want node_modules in this one, for good reason). See Exclude files and folders for patterns.
Step 7 — Save
Click Save. macup prepares the repository on the destination and starts the first snapshot immediately. On a quiet source the first round finishes in minutes; on a full home folder, expect a longer initial upload followed by fast incrementals forever after.
How many sets is too many
There is no hard limit. A six-person studio we know runs seven sets across four Macs — a continuous home set to macup Cloud, a nightly external-drive set, a project archive set on manual, an Apple Photos set, and three device-specific variants. macup schedules them so they do not step on each other: continuous work gets priority, scheduled sets queue behind it, and bandwidth rules apply across the whole group. Add the sets your work actually needs. Skip the rest.