My main work machine, an M2 MacBook Air, meshes really well with my iPhone SE (they are in the same ecosystem after all - duh!). Since both of these devices are Apple products, it makes sense that I pay for the optional iCloud service for extra storage. 50GB to be exact. I only need to bare minimum which costs just $1.68 a month, making this storage option cheaper than most cups of coffee these days.

Recently I've been using iCloud as my "middle-man" backup system. I still have local, offline storage for most personal data but having additional off-site backups is never a bad thing. I make things easier for myself by taking advantage of rsync. You'll need to make sure you have that program installed before trying this yourself:

# This assumes you have homebrew installed first
brew install rsync

Then, whenever I feel like backing up an existing project or website I simply run:

rsync -a user_name@ssh.webserver.domain:/home/var/www/ /Users/username/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com\~apple\~CloudDocs/Backups/site-backup

Note: The -a option tells rsync to sync directories recursively, transfer special and block devices, preserve symbolic links, modification times, groups, ownership, and permissions.

The beautiful magic of rsync! Obviously, you'd want to properly name your directories (ie. /Backups/site-backup) for a cleaner structure and ensure that your iCloud directory is set correctly. (remember to read code before just copy-pasting!). With this approach you can backup entire server directories or be specific with each individual project folder. I would also recommend setting up some alias in your .bashrc or .zshrc etc. to make things more streamlined when running backups manually:

alias site-backup="rsync -a user_name@ssh.webserver.domain:/home/var/www/ /Users/username/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com\~apple\~CloudDocs/Backups/site-backup"
# Then you simply run the following for a manual backup:
site-backup

You can take this further by automating things via cron jobs, but for my use case that is a little overkill. Hopefully this helps anyone looking for a quick and dirty backup system, especially one that can piggyback of your existing iCloud that you might be paying for already.