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This strategy won’t work if you have to reset a Time Machine backup or other archive, or if you swap among Time Machine volumes to keep an onsite and offsite set.
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The best way to ensure you have a full backup with this method is to not enable any optimization until you have your first complete backup performed on all the services you plan to use. That will leave you with an archived copy before macOS could decide to remove the file for optimization. You can “game” optimization in one specific way, though you can’t guarantee it will work to back up all the files you want: the most recent files you create or modify will almost always be backed up quickly by Time Machine or an online service that frequently checks for modified files. It’s unclear what happened, but these synced files so far remain missing. Even with Apple’s help, they were able to restore only a fraction of the lost files, despite having experienced going through this before: in a previous failure, all files were restored.
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Making iCloud your only copy for synced data that’s pushed off your drives or devices for optimization has drawbacks:
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The drawbacks of relying on iCloud-only offloaded files
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