How to backup iCloud drive on portable hard drive

A friend who lives 1000's of miles away from me had the same setup as I do with iCloud Drive. All documents and photos saved to iCloud (my photos saved to my computer). She has MacBook Air (husband has his own MacBook) and Airport Extreme for Time Machine backups. She just experienced one of the worst nightmares of all computer users. A very bad breakup with her husband left her with a cable & wireless being canceled so no internet or cell and upon arriving home from work she found her MacBook, her airport extreme and printer all smashed. She called me and asked me what she should do. I asked if she had an off-site backup, which she did not. I told her to call police and then I would get back to her, but I am at a lose as to what I should suggest to her. But the whole incident did make we worry about my computer stuff. I make regular backups of my computer's HDD and keep them off-site but since I use iCloud Drive to store my documents, I wonder about accessing that info with no internet and I am not happy about the idea of using Starbucks wi-fi to access such items. Is there a way to make a copy of my iCloud drive items to a portable diskdrive.

Do you have to sign in to iCloud, through a browser to access your files? Or, do you have an iCloud Drive folder in your Finder sidebar?

Ferrari,
Both, although most of the time I use the sidebar. Had a prob a few months back in which I found that the alias to some of my documents which were on my screen, were being directed to iCloud Drive (archive) inside my user folder instead of iCloud Drive. I fixed all that and after making sure everything was up to date, I deleted everything in the archives folder. I am still checking to make sure all alias and new saves go ti icloud, which they do. I always figured I could just copy over from either safari or from the side bar, but since I use carbon copy cloner, I am hoping to continue since the copy is only for new stuff and not the entire 40 or GB

As long as you keep making regular backups and store them off site you should be OK. Most off site backup plans will send you a hard drive with your data (for an extra fee) in the event you should ever lose your internet connection. However, restoring from off site at Starbucks or McDonalds would not work very well not because of the security but because it would take a very long time. By the way, we can never have "too many" backups.

chscap,
when I say off site, I just mean I keep my backups at a different location than my home. I still do the backup on a portable hard drive. Icloud Drive is the only place that stores my info online

tape said:

when I say off site, I just mean I keep my backups at a different location than my home. I still do the backup on a portable hard drive. Icloud Drive is the only place that stores my info online

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That's fine. As long as your backup is stored somewhere safe and that you can get at it quickly if you need it. Using iCloud drive is likewise OK, however, with only 5 GB for free you can use up that space very fast. Extra space is not expensive though.