Got To Glow

Updated September 2026: still no way to point Time Machine at iCloud. What has changed is that the alternatives are better, so this post now covers what to use instead.

My MacBook Pro has died twice. Both times Time Machine got my files back, and both times I got lucky, because the backup that saved me was sitting on a drive in the same room as the laptop that failed.

That is the flaw. Time Machine on macOS backs up to a disk you own and can touch. An external drive over USB, or a network volume such as a NAS or another Mac sharing a folder. There is no option to send a Time Machine backup to iCloud, and after all these years there still isn't one.

Why a local-only backup is weaker than it looks

A backup protects you from the thing that destroys the original. Local backups only protect you from one of those things.

Drives fail on their own schedule. A spinning external drive that has been knocked off a desk once is a drive you should not be trusting with the only copy of your documents. Mine has been dropped. I still used it for another year, which was daft.

Then there is the interrupted backup. Unplug during a write, or let the Mac sleep mid-pass, and you can end up with a backup set that appears in Time Machine and fails when you actually ask it to restore. You find this out on the worst possible day. That is the category of failure people never plan for, because a backup that exists feels like a backup that works.

And the obvious one. Fire, flood, theft, or a house move gone wrong takes the laptop and the drive together, because they live in the same bag.

The travel problem

Accidents happen away from home more than at home. That is when the laptop is in a bag, on a train, on a desk that isn't yours. It is also exactly when the backup drive is sitting at home, plugged into nothing.

So the period of highest risk is the period with no recent backup. If you travel for work with a Mac and your only backup is an external drive in a drawer, you are carrying the risk without the cover.

What iCloud actually does, and what it doesn't

This is where a lot of Mac owners get caught, so it is worth being precise.

iCloud Drive with Desktop and Documents Folders turned on keeps those two folders in sync across your devices. That is sync, not backup. If a file is deleted or corrupted on the Mac, the change syncs up. You get 30 days to recover deleted files from iCloud.com, which is a real safety net but a short one, and it does not hold months of versions of a document the way Time Machine does.

iCloud also does not carry your applications, your system settings, or anything outside the folders you have chosen. Restoring a dead Mac from iCloud gives you your files back eventually. It does not give you your machine back in an hour, which is the thing Time Machine is genuinely good at.

So the two are not substitutes. Apple has never claimed they were. The gap is that Apple sells cloud storage, sells a backup tool, and will not let one write to the other.

What I do instead

Two copies, two kinds, and I test one of them.

Time Machine to a local drive stays. It is still the fastest way back from a dead Mac, because Migration Assistant can rebuild a new machine from it, applications and settings included. Nothing cloud-based restores a working Mac that quickly.

Alongside it, an off-site backup that runs without me remembering anything. Backblaze and Arq are the two most people end up on. Backblaze runs unlimited continuous backup from one Mac for a flat subscription and needs no thought after setup. Arq is a licence you buy once and point at storage you already have, including iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive or an S3-style bucket, which is the closest thing to the feature I originally asked for.

Check the prices yourself before you commit. Both change them, and a stale figure in a blog post is worse than no figure.

The part people skip is the test. Once a quarter, restore one file you actually care about from each backup. Not a screenshot. A real document. A backup you have never restored from is a theory.

If you only change one thing

Get the second copy out of the building. Any method. An off-site service, a second drive at a relative's house that you swap every month, even a folder of your genuinely irreplaceable files in cloud storage.

The local drive is not the weak link because it might fail. It is the weak link because it is in the same room as the Mac.

My own MacBook failure and what it cost me is written up in this account of the 2012 MacBook Pro breaking down, and the machine that replaced it is covered in the 14-inch MacBook Pro write-up. Both of those stories end better because a backup existed.

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Updated September 2026: pivot tables arrived in Numbers after this post first went up, so the list below has been rewritten around what is still missing rather than what has since been fixed.

I moved my spreadsheets off Microsoft Excel and on to Apple Numbers because the Mac came with it and Excel did not. Five years later I still open Excel two or three times a month. Not for the big jobs. For three small ones that Numbers either does badly or does not do at all.

This is what actually stops a full switch, written from the position of someone who has tried to make it work rather than someone testing both for a week.

What changed since I first wrote this

My original complaint was that Numbers could not summarise data the way an Excel pivot table does. That is no longer true. Apple added pivot tables to Numbers on Mac, iPad and iPhone, and they now have their own chapter in Apple's Numbers user guide. You select the source table, choose Pivot Table from the toolbar, then drag fields into rows, columns and values.

They are not as fast to build as Excel's, and refreshing behaves differently. But the feature is there, it works, and anyone repeating the old advice that Numbers has no pivot tables is working from a stale article. Mine was one of them, which is why this one says so at the top.

Sort and filter still cost more clicks than they should

Numbers has both. The problem is where they live. In Excel the filter arrows sit on the header row, one click away, and you work inside the sheet. In Numbers you open the Organise panel on the right, add a rule, pick a column, pick a condition, then read the result back in the table.

That is fine for a filter you keep. It is slow for the thing people actually do with filters, which is to try six of them in a row while they work out what the data is telling them. I still catch myself exporting to Excel for that, then bringing the answer back. Bad habit. Real reason.

No paste with transpose

This is the one that has never been fixed and the one I would fix first. In Excel you copy a range, then paste it with rows and columns swapped. In Numbers there is no equivalent paste option.

The workaround is the TRANSPOSE function, which Numbers does have. You select an empty range, enter TRANSPOSE with the source range, and you get a live copy that is flipped. It works. It also leaves you with formulas rather than values, so you then copy the result and paste it back over itself as values if you want plain numbers.

Three steps to do one thing. For a spreadsheet full of data pulled out of a bank statement or a payroll export, where rows and columns almost never arrive the way you need them, those three steps repeat all afternoon.

The toolbar complaint was mine, not the app's

I used to say Numbers would not let you set up the toolbar the way Excel's ribbon works. That was wrong, and it is worth admitting. View, then Customise Toolbar, lets you drag the buttons you want into place and drop the ones you never press.

What Excel has is not a better toolbar. It is a ribbon that surfaces functions you did not know existed, which is a genuinely different thing. Numbers hides its depth behind panels, so you tend to use the twenty features you already know about. If you want to find out what a spreadsheet can do, Excel teaches you more. If you already know, Numbers gets out of the way.

Where the gap is widest

Automation. Excel has macros and Power Query, so a repetitive monthly clean-up can be recorded once and replayed. Numbers has neither. You can drive it from Shortcuts and AppleScript, which covers opening files and exporting them, but not the in-sheet transformations that take the time.

If your spreadsheet work is the same shape every month, that difference will decide it for you and nothing else on this page matters.

File exchange, and the part nobody warns you about

A .numbers file is not a spreadsheet anyone else can open. Send one to a colleague on Windows and it is an unreadable bundle. Numbers exports to .xlsx from File, Export To, Excel, and the export is honest about structure but loses some formatting and any Numbers-only feature you have leaned on.

So if you share files, you are not really choosing Numbers. You are choosing Numbers plus an export step forever. Worth knowing before you migrate a folder of live documents rather than after.

What I would tell someone deciding today

Numbers is the better app for spreadsheets you build, read and keep. Its canvas model, where a sheet holds several small tables instead of one endless grid, matches how most household and small-business documents are actually laid out. Budgets, quotes, stock lists, a running log of repairs. It is genuinely nicer for those.

Excel is still the better app for data you receive. Anything that arrives as an export from someone else's system, in the wrong shape, needing the same clean-up every month, is Excel's job.

I keep both. That is not the tidy answer, and I would rather not need it. But paying for one Microsoft 365 licence to handle a handful of jobs a month has been cheaper for me than fighting the app that came free with the Mac.

If you are weighing up which Apple hardware to run any of this on, my notes on living with the 14-inch MacBook Pro cover the machine side. And if you are moving documents between machines, read what I learnt about Time Machine and off-site backup first, because moving files is the easy half.

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