macup Cloud is the managed destination we run for you. It is designed to be the simplest safe answer to the question “where should my backups live?” — you do not provision buckets, you do not copy keys, and you do not get an egress bill the first time you need to restore.
What makes macup Cloud different
macup Cloud is a managed, hot, no-egress storage tier with Object Lock compliance mode enabled on every bucket we create for you. That combination matters:
- Managed. No console to log into, no IAM users to rotate, no lifecycle rules to write. We run the storage; you run backups.
- Hot. Restores start immediately. There is no retrieval delay, no rehydration step, no glacier tier to thaw.
- No egress fees. Your tier price includes all downloads. Restoring a 2 TB archive three times in a year costs the same as restoring it zero times.
- Object Lock compliance mode, always on. Every snapshot is written as immutable retention for its policy window. Ransomware on your Mac cannot delete, overwrite, or truncate what is already in the cloud. There is no opt-out; this is the default because it is the point.
- Content-addressed dedup across your fleet. If you back up three Macs that share the same 40 GB of application data, we store that data once.
- 99.95% uptime target. Published on our status page.
Step 1 — Open the Destinations pane
Open macup > Preferences > Destinations. Click Add destination. Choose macup Cloud.
Step 2 — Pick a capacity tier
Tiers are priced by the terabyte of stored data, not by bandwidth or request count. Available tiers:
- 1 TB — for a single Mac with a reasonable creative library.
- 5 TB — for a Mac with a serious video or photo archive, or a small family.
- 20 TB — for small teams or very large single-user archives.
- Custom (MSP). For managed service providers running many Macs under one roof, contact sales.
Pricing by tier is on /backup/pricing. You can change tiers later without re-uploading a byte.
Step 3 — Let macup provision the repository
Click Create. macup creates the repository for you. There is no bucket to name, no region to pick, no access key to copy, no IAM user to write a policy for. The whole step takes seconds.
Step 4 — Point a backup set at it
Go to Backup Sets, pick the set you want to protect, open the Destination tab, and select your new macup Cloud destination. If you do not have a set yet, create one first — the Install and First Backup guide walks through it.
Step 5 — The first snapshot uploads
The initial snapshot is the slow one. It has to send every byte. After that, every snapshot is incremental and usually lands in the megabyte range even for a working creative Mac.
A rough guide for first-snapshot time on a reliable gigabit connection:
- 200 GB — about 45 minutes.
- 1 TB — about 3 to 4 hours.
- 2 TB — about 6 to 8 hours.
- 5 TB — about a day, plan overnight runs.
Upload runs in the background and survives sleep, reboots, and network drops. There is nothing to babysit.
Encryption recap
Encryption is AES-256. Your key is derived from your passphrase on your Mac and stored in Keychain. We see ciphertext only. We cannot decrypt your backups, produce a reset link, or hand a court-compelled plaintext copy to anyone. If you lose your passphrase and your recovery code and your hardware, the data is gone. That is the guarantee; it is also the responsibility. Set a passphrase you will remember and print the recovery code.
Cost note
The tier price is the whole price. No egress fees, no request fees, no retrieval fees. If you restore your entire archive three times a year, the bill is the same as if you never restored at all. This is deliberate: a backup system that charges you to test it is a backup system you will not test.
When macup Cloud is not the right answer
macup Cloud is designed for most people. It is not always the right answer:
- You already own unlimited on-prem storage and have an operator to run it — use BYOS with MinIO.
- You have strict data-residency requirements that our published regions do not satisfy — use BYOS with a provider that does.
- Your procurement department has already approved a specific storage vendor — use BYOS.
For those cases, see the BYOS guide. For everyone else: pick a tier, point a set at it, and get on with your work.