Getting started

When MomentBackup opens for the first time, it walks you through three choices. The whole setup takes a couple of minutes; the first backup starts on its own when you’re done.

1. Choose what to protect

Your home folder is the right answer for most people — it holds your documents, photos, desktop, and almost everything you’d miss. You can pick any folder, and you can add more later.

2. Choose where backups live

Three kinds of destination work out of the box:

An external drive — the simplest option. Plug it in and pick it.
A network drive — a NAS or shared folder on your network, the same kind Time Machine uses.
Cloud storage — your own S3-compatible bucket. You pay your provider directly; MomentBackup never holds your data.

See Choosing a destination for the trade-offs.

3. Decide about encryption

If you turn encryption on (recommended, and strongly recommended for cloud), you choose a passphrase and MomentBackup shows you a recovery key — once. Print it or save it somewhere that isn’t the computer you’re backing up. Either the passphrase or the key opens your backups; if you lose both, nobody can decrypt them, including us.

After setup

That’s it. The first backup runs in the background — you can keep using your computer — and from then on backups happen automatically on a schedule. The Backup health screen answers the only question that matters at a glance: are you protected right now.

Still stuck? Email [email protected] and include what you were doing and what you expected.