The goal of this article is simple: get macup installed, get your first backup running, and leave you confident that the thing is actually working. No dark arts, no Terminal acrobatics. About five minutes if nothing surprises you.
Step 1 — Download the DMG
Open macup.app/download in Safari and click Download macup for Mac. The file is signed and notarized, which means Apple has already checked it for known malware before it ever reaches your machine. If macOS flags a fresh download as unrecognized, you have the wrong file — grab it again from the official page.
Below the download button you will find a published SHA-256 checksum. If you are the sort of person who checks these, compare it against the file you just downloaded. If you are not that sort of person, that is fine too — notarization already covers the common cases.
Step 2 — Drag macup to Applications
Double-click the DMG. A small window opens with the macup icon on the left and an Applications shortcut on the right. Drag the icon onto Applications. Wait for the copy to finish, then eject the DMG from the Finder sidebar.
Open Applications and launch macup. The first time you open it, macOS will confirm that the app was notarized by Apple and ask you to continue. Click Open.
Step 3 — Create your macup account
macup opens into a short welcome flow. You can sign up with an email address and passphrase, or Continue with Apple. Either is fine. Use a passphrase you will actually remember — macup cannot reset it for you, because we never see it.
After you finish signing up, macup shows your recovery code exactly once. This is a second, independent way back into your encrypted backups if you ever lose your passphrase. Treat it the way you would treat a hardware wallet seed phrase:
Save it properly
Screenshot it. Write it on paper. Drop it in your password manager. Do all three if you want. Store at least one copy somewhere you will still be able to find in two years. Click I’ve saved it to continue.
Step 4 — Grant Full Disk Access
macup asks for Full Disk Access on first launch. Without it, macup can only read its own sandbox, which is not a backup by any useful definition. Click Open System Settings, toggle macup on in Privacy & Security > Full Disk Access, and relaunch when prompted.
The full walkthrough — including what Full Disk Access does and does not let macup see — lives in Grant Full Disk Access (and why).
Step 5 — Pick your first destination
macup then asks where you want your backups to live. You have two honest choices:
- macup Cloud. Managed by us. No egress fees, no per-seat math, compliance-mode Object Lock on every bucket. This is what we recommend for most people. See Back up to macup Cloud.
- Bring your own storage. Your own S3-compatible bucket, your own external drive, or both. You keep full control and pay the underlying provider directly. See Back up to an external drive for the local path.
You can add more destinations later from macup > Preferences > Destinations. For now, pick one and click Start first backup.
Step 6 — Wait for the first backup
The first backup reads every file you have asked macup to protect, encrypts it on your Mac, and uploads it. This takes a while — usually a few hours on a large photo library, sometimes overnight on a loaded Mac Studio. That is normal. You are only paying this cost once.
Every backup after the first one is continuous and mostly silent. macup notices file changes as they happen and only uploads what is new, so there is no nightly window to plan around and no spinning beach ball to dread.
You can keep using your Mac the whole time. Close the lid, go to a meeting, come back. The backup resumes.
Once the first run finishes, you have done the thing. Your Mac is backed up. Before you close the laptop, test a restore on Friday — pick any file, bring it back, watch it land on your Desktop. That one small ritual is what turns “I have a backup” into “I have a backup I trust.” See Restore a single file for how.