Turn Left at the Next Tree

**Marco Arment** (0:00)
Oh, I'm a little sick.

**Casey Liss** (0:01)
You too?

**Marco Arment** (0:02)
Yeah, you too. Yeah, so what happened was, last week, as I'm getting ready to do the Great Saunter, like the day before.

**Casey Liss** (0:10)
Oh, I don't love this.

**Marco Arment** (0:11)
Yeah, the day before, I wake up, and I had a little bit of congestion for a few days, but my car was also turning yellow last week because it's pollen season. Right now, at this moment, for this particular six-month period, I don't own an ostensibly yellow car, but it happens sometimes.

**Casey Liss** (0:30)
It can happen to you, Marco.

**Marco Arment** (0:31)
Right, but this is not one of those times.
So I figured, oh, it's just allergies. Then every day, the congestion gets a little bit worse. I'm like, oh, it's allergies.
Then the day before the saunter, I get a sore throat. Now, at this point, I was still telling myself, wow, the allergies are really bad right now. To be so bad, it caused a sore throat. I mean, obviously, totally in denial because I was not going to be sick and miss the saunter after training for it for like eight or nine months or whatever it's been. I'm not going to miss it. So I willed myself into thinking I was not sick. However, it became pretty clear a day later, two days later, I'm like, oh yeah, no, this is, I'm definitely sick. This is not allergies. It's really just a cold. So tis the season.

**Casey Liss** (1:18)
Tis the season. So it's funny you say that because I'm sitting here doing some work in the evening time, which is unusual for me, but my boss is a jerk, so here we are.
So I was doing work in the evening time and I was sitting here and I was like, huh, hmm, hmm, I don't think that's good. And I'm feeling like just the beginnings of like the zygote of a sore throat. You know what I mean? Like just the idios, littlest bit of sore throat. And I'm like, oh, yep, that's probably coming for me maybe tomorrow, certainly over the weekend because the kids both had like colds and light sore throats. Declan in particular is extremely susceptible to strep. And as far as we could tell, it wasn't that, but yeah, it sounds like I'm coming down with cold as well. I guess Marco and you and I shouldn't have been smooching over the last few days. That's really what ruined everything.

**Marco Arment** (2:01)
Yeah, you got it for me through last week's show, I guess.

**Casey Liss** (2:04)
Yeah, right.
Well, with that in mind, let's just get started. And start with some follow up with regard to backblazing cloud backups. Barry Rubenstein writes, one of the best backup decisions I recently made was switching from Time Machine to Carbon Copy Cloner plus Backblaze. It works seamlessly in the background, provides a ton of options to customize. Carbon Copy Cloner backs up all of the major cloud file providers including Dropbox, iCloud, Google Drive, etc. It temporarily downloads only new or changed files locally for backup and then quote unquote evicts those local copies. I back these up to a dedicated volume on my external backup drive and then have Backblaze backup that drive. Here's the support document on how it works which we will link in the show notes.

**John Siracusa** (2:48)
This is highlighting a backup strategy that I tend not to think about but a lot of people find valuable. I'm always like just backup the whole volume, like everything, don't pick and choose directories. But a lot of people know they have a habit where they're like, look, the only files I care about are here or in these two locations. If that's the case with you, you can use lots of other solutions that are much more targeted. So this one is basically like Carbon Copy Cloner, which Carbon Copy Cloner does the whole drive to be clear. But if you only care about these specific directories, you could target copy those with Arc or Carbon Copy Cloner or whatever to another place.
Again, given its claim that it's going to ask for them to be downloaded from the Cloud service, back them up and then evict them. Assuming that all that works and is successful, what you end up with is a target drive that just contain the files you want to backup, and they're just plain files. They came from Cloud files maybe in the source, but in their destination, they're just plain files. And then you point backblaze at that drive, and it Cloud backs up that drive. And again, all the files are plain files, there's no Cloud anything.