TL;DR: Part two of the Apple Account series. Backup apps that pull your iCloud data down to storage you control, email providers that speak IMAP/CalDAV/CardDAV so Apple's own apps keep working without iCloud, ways to buy and track software outside the App Store, and a password manager that isn't Keychain. My own five picks are at the end, along with why you should be testing a restore every quarter.

Disaster Avoidance Apps

Yesterday I laid out what happens when Apple closes your account: your identity if it's an @icloud.com address, your photos and messages, your purchases, your hardware in every practical sense, and a 2023 federal ruling that says suspicion is the only standard Apple has to meet. That post was the bad news.

This is the other half. These are the apps and services that move your data out from under a single Apple Account, what each one actually protects, and where each one falls short. There are more options here than anyone needs, and I have not run most of them. At the end I'll tell you the five I actually use and why I stopped looking after those.

iCloud Backup Apps

• BackiGo. Photos, videos, iCloud Drive and Contacts, backed up and restored to USB, NAS, or cloud storage you control. Drive versioning, scheduling, incremental backups, optional client-side encryption, and browsable restoration. I reviewed it here: BackiGo is a Dependable and Full Featured iCloud Backup Solution.
• Parachute Backup. Downloads iCloud Photos and iCloud Drive to external drives, NAS, or cloud folders. Handles originals, edits, Live Photos and Shared Albums, with scheduling and full, incremental or mirror modes. My review: Parachute Backup, Specially Designed for iCloud and Photos. Restore to a location that doesn't depend on the same Apple Account, or you've built a circle. The original dev sold the app and I moved to Backigo.
• Time Machine, with one warning that undoes the whole thing if you miss it. Turn off Optimize Mac Storage in your iCloud settings. Leave it on and macOS keeps only stubs of your iCloud files locally, so Time Machine dutifully backs up the stubs and you find out the day you need the originals.

Standards-Based Providers for Email, Calendars and Contacts

You can keep using Apple's Mail, Calendar and Contacts without tying any of the data to your Apple Account, by pointing them at a provider that supports IMAP, CardDAV and CalDAV. Reminders is the exception; Apple moved it to a private format, though Things 3 can pull to-dos out of a designated Reminders list into its own inbox.

Five providers with full IMAP/CardDAV/CalDAV support on macOS:

1. Fastmail. JMAP, IMAP, CardDAV and CalDAV, with push sync on Apple devices. Custom domains and third-party app access both come with the Individual plan; the cheaper Basic business plan has neither, so don't buy that one for this purpose. I've been using Fastmail for two years, and it also runs an MCP server if you want your mail reachable from an AI agent.
2. Mailfence. IMAP, CalDAV and CardDAV syncing straight into Apple Mail and Calendar. Belgium-based, EU jurisdiction.
3. Posteo. IMAP, POP, CalDAV and CardDAV for €1 a month, which makes it the cheapest option on this list by a wide margin. Germany-based with serious privacy protections. It does not support custom domains, so it solves the provider problem without solving the address-ownership problem.
4. Mailbox.org. CalDAV and CardDAV plus ActiveSync, with a bundled office suite. Germany-based, 30-day free trial.
5. Runbox. IMAP with CalDAV and CardDAV. The Runbox 7 web interface is still in development, so plan on using it through standard clients.

All five work natively with macOS Calendar and Contacts. Fastmail has the smoothest CalDAV experience of the ones I've touched. Posteo is the cheapest. Mailfence leans hardest on open standards.

Software Acquisition and Licensing

Whenever you have the choice, download applications directly from the developer rather than from the App Store, so your access survives your Apple Account. You give up automatic updates, Family Sharing, and in a few cases unlimited installs.

Updaters that close the first gap:

• Updatest. Menu bar updater that scans each app's own metadata to find its update source, covering Homebrew, Mac App Store, Sparkle, Electron and GitHub Releases. $12.99 one-time for 3 Macs, $24.99 for 10. Fourteen-day trial, 30-day money-back guarantee. Requires macOS 15 or later.
• Nektony App Cleaner & Uninstaller. Broad app coverage with direct update installation, and it handles uninstalls too. $24.95 a year. It's fast and doesn't miss much - but that subscription...
• Latest. Free and lightweight. Checks Mac App Store and Sparkle apps only, so expect it to catch a fraction of what the paid tools track. It's free, but it misses things the paid apps pick up.
• TrashMe 3. Cleaner and uninstaller with update detection as a side feature, plus duplicate files and startup item management. $17.99 one-time, 15-day trial.
• Homebrew with topgrade. One terminal command updates Homebrew packages, Mac App Store apps and system tools. Free, broadest coverage, and the only one here that expects you to be comfortable at a prompt. I run this every four hours with launchd.

Then track the licenses somewhere you can export from:

• License Store. Library for keys, license files, invoices and expiration dates, with drag-and-drop app import and export to CSV, JSON or its own .ls format. $7.99 one-time for the current major version, one user, up to five Macs. Requires macOS 26, which rules it out if you haven't moved to Tahoe. It syncs through iCloud, which is the dependency this whole post is about. Treat the sync as convenience between your own Macs and the manual export as the backup. Export to JSON or CSV on a schedule, put the file wherever your other backups live, and import it once to confirm the round trip works before you need it to.
• AppVault. The everything option: app snapshots with restore, unified updates across Sparkle, Homebrew, Mac App Store and Electron, a license vault with CSV import, spending tracker, deep uninstall with 14-day quarantine. $21.99 one-time, lifetime license, 3 Macs. I'm currently testing this.

An Independent Password Manager

Keep your passwords, recovery codes, server credentials and export encryption passwords outside iCloud Keychain. Then protect the new vault's recovery material somewhere else again, or you've just relocated your single point of failure.

• Bitwarden. Open source, end-to-end encrypted, cross-platform. The free tier covers unlimited passwords on unlimited devices, which is all most people need. Premium is $19.80 a year and adds encrypted file storage and YubiKey support.
• 1Password. $3.99 a month for individuals. Autofill, Watchtower breach alerts, 14-day trial, and the most polished Apple-side experience of the group. I stopped uing this when it went electron.
• KeePass. Free, open source, entirely offline, AES-256 by default, extended by community plugins. No sync and no polish; you build both yourself. The right answer if you want zero dependencies and the wrong one if you want it to just work.

Unless I've said otherwise above, the apps in this post come from research rather than daily use. The five below are the exception.

What I Actually Run

Five, and the list has been stable long enough that I've stopped shopping.

BackiGo pulls my iCloud Photos and Drive down to local storage on a schedule. It's the only one on this list that gets irreplaceable data out of Apple's custody.

Fastmail holds my mail, calendars and contacts on a domain I own, and Apple's own Mail, Calendar and Contacts talk to it over IMAP, CalDAV and CardDAV without knowing the difference. Two years in. If Apple closed my account tomorrow, my address would still work, which was the whole point.

Updatest keeps the direct-download side of my Mac current. Buying from developers instead of the App Store costs you automatic updates, and this is what I bought to pay that cost back.

License Store holds the keys and invoices for everything I didn't buy through Apple. The JSON export goes out on a schedule and lands with my other backups, per the caveat above.

Bitwarden keeps my passwords and recovery codes out of iCloud Keychain. The free tier does everything I need and I pay for Premium anyway, because a project I depend on this much should get some money from me.

Test the Restore, Not the Backup

None of this counts until you've restored from it. A backup you have never pulled a file out of is not a backup; it's a hypothesis with a progress bar. Once a quarter, pick something you'd hate to lose, a photo from ten years ago, a document with a deadline attached to it, and restore it to a machine that isn't signed in to the account you're insuring against. Open it. Confirm it's the full-resolution original and not a thumbnail, that the metadata came along, that the encryption password you set eighteen months ago still unlocks the archive. The failures I've seen were never missing backups. They were backups that ran green for two years and turned out to be empty, stale, or locked with a password nobody wrote down.