I like the idea and have been thinking of a simpler yet effective method. For now, I've set my family devices to be;

- All settings, the app preferences, app data are saved via iCloud, so their game preferences are carried over when changing devices.

- I've added cheap portable drives as Time Machines for their MacBook. My daughter thinks I'm a geeky magician when I let her fly through time to recover her work/play.

I'm yet to make them learn and think in terms of files and not just apps. They have no concept of saving!

Edit: Removed the cheesy photo.

I taught in high school for several decades and can tell you I saw this shift happen over the past 15 years (by the way I saw my students were just using search rather than folder hierarchies.)

> I'm yet to make them learn and think in terms of files and not just apps. They > >have no concept of saving!

Mobile apps have taken that concept away due to firewalled apps and privacy - just wish Android and iOS would use some kind of meta tagging system when saving documents.

Fellow programmer dad comments here…

The art of backup for Minecraft worlds is just so convoluted / bad… on Kindles, on Nintendo Switch, etc. I’ve spent hours, made bits of progress, but have found it so exhausting I have kind of given up… Finally just started transitioning kids to laptops with better backup options.

(I was hex editing disk sectors in my youth to mess with games and have been searching the web to solve programming problems for 20 years so I’m not completely incompetent. I am more impatient/annoyed however.)

It all gets worse when you mix in parental controls. Parental controls software are another thing that is unbelievably cumbersome to use effectively, particularly YouTube.

Parenting with clear rules and expectations and some oversight seems wildly successful in comparison… but it’d be nice if the tech worked well for the user, not just the buyer making the initial sale.

I clone my kids' drives with Clonezilla, but not often enough.

iCloud for their phones and Family OneDrive for their laptops. It saved me a few panic-stricken calls of "Dad I can't find my assignment I did last year".

Now if only they would understand the concept of meaningful filenames.

As a teacher, I have often been astounded how 17 or 18 year old students don't know about backups and lose big project files at crucial moments.

I would encourage you to start looking into methods that don't gather your children's data

I think it is better to store your child's data in such a way that their files are both backed up and kept private.

That would mean hosting something myself and I never would want to do that. I do have cloud and home servers, but it does not sit right with me - rather Apple and Microsoft than their dad.

Maybe take a look at pCloud.

Will do.

Thanks for posting this here!