iCloud vs. Dropbox

By no means an expert, unfortunately, I have a lot of experience with crashing hard drives and backup (or not). Just experienced the 2nd hard drive failure on my MacBook Pro; had to purchase a new computer and am dealing with the loss of files and setting up the new computer.

Thought it would be useful to share my experience. I was using iCloud as my backup until I discovered that iCloud doesn't backup most of my important files (e.g., photos, documents, etc.). I learned this the hard way and confirmed it with Apple. I also had a Dropbox account which automatically saves files and that helped to save many of my photos when the latest hard drive failed. It isn't clear to me what Dropbox saves and how useful it might be as a backup too; clearly, it did not prevent me from losing information during this latest failure.  Frustrated with the performance (or lack thereof) of iCloud and Dropbox as backup, I purchased an Airport Time Capsule to backup my computer going forward. Lesson learned - don't depend on iCloud as a backup to your computer - it isn't designed as a backup system. I'm not sure of Dropbox as a backup system but it didn't save me from losing a lot of information. In the end, the old technology approach - an external hard drive (e.g., Airport Time Capsule) is still the best backup system - at least for me.