Keep Your iCloud Data. Forever.
Parachute is a set-and-forget backup companion for iCloud Photos and iCloud Drive. It automatically syncs your memories—photos, videos, and documents—to your own storage, giving you peace of mind and full control.
iCloud Isn't a Time Machine
Decades of photos, precious moments captured on video, critical documents. All in the cloud, until they're not. Parachute ensures your digital life is safe from accidental deletion, sync errors, or service failures—easy and seamlessly.
No Subscriptions. No Lock-In.
One-time setup. One-time purchase. Your files, backed up where you want.
Complete iCloud Backup
Your entire iCloud Photos and iCloud Drive with full fidelity preservation. Originals, edits, and live photos are all preserved. Even your Shared Albums!
Flexible Scheduling
Manual or scheduled runs, with the ability to override the schedule at any time.
Your Storage, Your Rules
Works with external drives, mounted NAS, or other clouds like Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive if you have them connected to your Mac.
Smart Offloading
Avoid filling up your Mac's hard drive with intelligent storage management. Parachute will offload items back to iCloud after they have been backed up.
Multiple Backup Modes
Choose from full, incremental, or mirror backups depending on your needs.
Beyond iCloud
Backup any folder or drive on your Mac, not just iCloud. Perfect for safeguarding local documents, downloads, and project files.
Frequently Asked Questions
Everything you need to know about Parachute Backup
Parachute is designed to avoid filling up your Mac's disk during backups. When it encounters a file that has been offloaded by iCloud, it temporarily downloads it, creates a local backup to your selected destination, and then automatically offloads it again from your Mac — assuming you have "Optimize Mac Storage" enabled. This one-at-a-time process ensures your storage stays lean throughout the backup process.
Parachute supports three backup modes:
Full: Backs up all content from the source every time, regardless of whether it has changed.
Mirror: Keeps your backup destination in exact sync with the source, including removing files from the backup if they no longer exist in iCloud.
Smart Incremental: Detects and backs up only new or modified files since your last backup, which saves both time and disk space.
Parachute never deletes content from iCloud under any circumstance. It is strictly a one-way backup.
Yes. Parachute backs up both the original and any edited versions of your photos and videos when available. This ensures that no part of your photo history is lost.
Parachute stores your backups as regular files and folders. To restore, simply browse to the backup destination using Finder and drag the files back to your desired location. There is no proprietary restore interface or format to deal with.
Sometimes iCloud Photos contains files that are corrupted or cannot be exported. When this happens, Parachute will list any items it couldn't back up in a summary at the end of the run. You may try exporting these files manually from Apple Photos, but they are often not recoverable.
Yes. Parachute supports backing up the photos and videos in Shared Albums that others have shared with you.
Yes. Parachute supports backups to local folders, network-attached storage (NAS), external hard drives, USB drives, mounted remote destinations such as SFTP or WebDAV, and many more.
Yes. You can add any folder on your Mac as a custom backup source. Parachute will include these folders in your scheduled or manual backups.
Ready to Backup Your iCloud?
Available now on the Mac App Store