Apple’s integration of iCloud into all its services and the availability of iCloud Drive makes it an attractive sync and storage option. You can use it to make sure your contacts and events are up to date across your Macs and iOS devices, and reachable via iCloud.com. Your photos and videos automatically upload for backup, and your passwords and other secret data gets securely synchronized on all your hardware—in a way that even Apple can’t peer into. You can even offload files on your Desktop and in your Documents file if you start running out of storage in macOS.
But there’s a problem: Apple doesn’t offer any way to let you backup the data for which it has the only copy. And, in many cases, you may have a mix of information that could make it hard to restore, even if you have a full copy.
