Hi folks
I know this might seem like an obvious question - but what process do you use for backing up? I am in the process of setting up a new iMac with a 512gb internal SSD and thinking about a Thunderbolt drive array for doing some vidoe/audio project work as well as my iTunes library, and all the associated content you gather over time and was interested in hearing about your setup, your process and how it works for you.
Cheers, Glen
I have a Synology NAS on my network with an attached USB hard drive.
Software backs up the various computers across the Lan to the NAS and the NAS backs up to the attached USB hard drive.
Now because this is all at the one location and some files I couldn’t do without I also back up selected critical files to the cloud (Dropbox Pro).
Periodically I mirror the USB backup drive to a 2nd USB drive and store it offsite (possibly not as often as I should however).
Airport Extreme with 1.5TB USB3 drive. Time Machine from the Mac’s to that, and an Acronis True Image from the Windows devices to another shared folder on the same Airport Extreme connected drive.
All the content from that drive syncs to off-site storage too.
Like this!
I have a Time Capsule, and also use SuperDuper! to make a bootable clone of my whole hard drive on a USB drive every couple of weeks, and before major updates.
However these days more and more of my stuff is in the Cloud. I have iTunes Match so I can download all my music, even those CDs I sucked into iTunes years ago. I use iCloud for photos. I use SugarSync to backup documents to the cloud and to sync between my MacBook (main day to day computer with only a subset of stuff on it) and my Mac Mini (master computer that sits at home and doubles as my TV, with copies of all my documents on it). Although I use Dropbox when I want to share files with other people, the advantage of SugarSync as a backup/syncing solution is that it can backup any file on your computer and it doesn’t have to move everything to one folder to backup.
I backup my internal drive with an Apple Time Capsule, Only reason I don’t backup my external drive to it is I don’t have the space and can’t decide which data on there’s a higher priority.
I also backup everything with BackBlaze (Shameless Referral Plug 
: https://secure.backblaze.com/r/01kkja).
I still backup my iTunes Library and Photos Library with BackBlaze (despite paying for iTunes Match, Apple Music and extra iCloud Storage), because an extra copy of that data doesn’t hurt.
My strategy is:
One of the key things to do in your backup strategy is to actually test your backups! I had to rely on one of my backups and found that it had corrupted. Luckily I have redundancy in my backups so it was not a problem, but if it had been my only backup I would have been stuffed.!
Nice.
I worry about other peoples backups (or lack there of) after years of fixing friends/family/colleagues computers who were distraught because “all their photos” are on there… Worse still I’ve had one person who bought a shiny new USB HDD because their laptop HDD was filling up… so they “backed up” all their photos to the USB drive… (you can see where this is going right?) … then deleted them from their computer… followed quickly by a HDD failure of the USB HDD about a week later…
The premise of a 2nd copy of stuff is just lost on many people, even some younger people who have grown up with tech are still clueless and run into issues when all the photos of their kids are gone because they dropped their iPhone into the bath.
At least it’s getting easier for the average person to do cloud backups, but sadly upload bandwidth leaves a little to be desired for most.
In our house we have a few layers of backup.
So the things I really don’t want to lose (documents and photos) are in the cloud and everything else is at separate ends of the house which protects from normal theft. Fire is still a (small) concern which leads to future plans.
I want to do two things.
Given I have lots of space on that second NAS if I added in another couple of replication jobs on a alternating monthly schedules I could buy myself additional time to notice the problem.
So far I haven’t looked too far into this sort of solution, but it’s something I’m getting to.
Alternatively I could look at getting together with a friend/family member and re-locating that spare NAS to use as my own private cloud (and offering the same at my place for them). This would probably be the most cost effective option although requires some DDNS magic (or static IP’s) to make it work.
That’s something I have thought about doing with my brother, but have not got around to it.
The other thing I was thinking about was having an online backup storage solution like Amazon Glacier. The weakness in my current strategy is the information on my NAS. Whilst I do back it up, it is not as frequent as I should and I have a lot of information there. Whilst that data is not essential, and I can always get it back (it’s mostly my ripped DVD/Blu Ray Collection), but it took me many, many weekends to create digital copies of most of my media.
I have a Time Capsule for the three Macs in the House. In addition all our photos are in the cloud, and all my music is on google music as well, and all personal docs are in Onedrive and Google Drive. That’s pretty much my digital life right there.
For me 1,500GB to Glacier is about $18 / month in Sydney or about $11 / month in a US datacenter.
To recover it all should you ever need to is $210 from the Sydney data centre or $135 from a US datacenter. I can’t quite see anything to confirm but I assume all those prices are in USD which brings it up by a decent margin with our poor dollar.
Even if you don’t have a spare NAS floating about there are plenty of cheap 1 and 2 drive options out there from Seagate or WD that will do the job, there is even something like the Lima that looks interesting.
https://meetlima.com/index.php?lang=en
These usually rely on some sort of back end to get around dynamic IP’s and are usually designed to put in your house to access your stuff elsewhere rather than to put elsewhere to work as a backup… but that should be easy enough to work around.
Of course there are also plenty of QNAP/Synology etc 1/2 drive units out there pretty cheap too.
My current redundancy and backup strategy:
I would love to also backup my photos and videos from Photos to iCloud but iCloud only goes up to 1 Tb, and I have more than that.
Note that Crashplan backups allows for history and versioning, which is helpful. I get double versioning with Dropbox as well for work files.
I use dropbox for a folder of the most important stuff, which also is handy for syncing across multiple machines
then i have a custom made mac that runs OS X server which exactly mirrors my drives and backs up hourly, that means if a drive in my main machine dies i can just extract the server backup and be back up and running potentially only losing an hour or less worth of data, thats using carbon copy cloner over the network, it happens in the background. That is for working drives (video and audio)
then there’s time machine over the network, the benefit is you can use 8tb drives and do huge backups, with a reliable power supply (you can use an older mac tower or hackintosh) to do this.
then i’ve got the same number of drives in external cases (all 4tb) that i backup once every week or two and keep separately.
it’s never failed me!
Well, see, I have this really nice bucket of sand. Whenever someone mentions the word “back up” I shove my head into the bucket as fast as I can, making sure to close my eyes first, cos sand in the eyes hurts. Occasionally something may happen, such as a shhh crash, requiring digging out software tools to resurrect a drive/machine… at which point the bucket of sand is summarily tossed out the window, and a new drive purchased for the express point of being a dedicated Back Up Drive. However, dedicated Back Up Drives all too often, in the warm light of day, look much nicer as storage devices for new data, and typically are re-assigned to other duties.
2TB drive connected to Airport Extreme Base Station performing Time Machine back ups… 
I am on my second Synology for media and photos. Plays well in a win / mac house. It backs up to a portable storage drive that gets swapped offsite every few months. Onedrive works well for my business docs.
Synology has great ios apps. I use photo station to backup photos directly to the nas form 4 ios devices. I stream video to apply TV from it. I host test websites and backup live sites to it.
The cloud backup option wanst ideal for me with terrabytes of media and family photos. I hate having another computer to manage, but it is pretty painless all the same.
I once had an N54L Microserver and always planned to switch our Time Machine backups to a RAID array in that but never actually did. It ended up being our HTPC for a couple of years but I got sick of fighting with Windows Media Centre for recording TV and so I bought a cheap PVR from DSE which did the job far better (with triple tuners) and sold the HTPC to some dude off Overclockers (Microservers appear to be a very Overclockery thing).
It was a fun machine to work on though and very serviceable, I miss playing with it even if it looked like a very small fridge.