🪴 Some Hard Drive Notes
⚠️⚠️⚠️ All Hard drives will fail eventually this is the law of the universe. Backup is a system not a place you arrive at once and stay. ⚠️⚠️⚠️
Extra space
I have too much stuff and it doesn’t fit on my internal SSD for my Mac. To store all the stuff I which was on my computer but isn’t (photos, music, movies)
I use an external drive.
I mount it in a dock like this (I have a older version of this):
https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/external-drives/owc-drive-dock
- key thing I like is having 2 bays this make transferring between drives less of a hassle
- this can mount 3.5 or 2.5 inch (laptop drives)
I generally buy whatever size drive I can get for $150 the last one I bought was:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07H289S7C/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&th=1
This got me 8 TB of space
This is big, cheap, and slow. Reading mp3’s and long term storage of files is fine for me I don’t need super fast here.
Time machine
I use time machine to have a backup for the oh shit I didn’t mean to delete that the other day, let me go get it. I would say I only actually use this 1-2 a year but knowing its there makes me happy.
I mount another 3.5 HDD in the external drive in the 2 bay drive dock.
Backup #1
So the extra space drive mentioned above gets backed-up 1 a week to one of these:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07MK3T28F/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&th=1
My reasoning here is that that extra stuff is really the hardest stuff to recreate if a fire, etc was to happen so my goal is that I could literally grab that and run and only need to find a new power source to get back to things.
I use SuperDuper to automate this backup which makes an exact copy from my 8TB drive mounted in the drive bay to this fancy 8 TB Lacie drive.
Online Backup
My entire extra drive 8TB and my main working machine is backed up to Backblaze (affiliate link). This is ~$70 a year to backup roughly 10 TB of data I honestly don’t know how its that cheap. I also pay an additional fee ~$25 a year to have version history on this.
This backup runs constantly on my main working machine and can backup any mounted external drives on that machine.
I have only used the actual backup one (to literally save photos of my new born child) that got lost during a power outage. So I am emotionally tied to them, make your own decisions
The edges
I use iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive for various workflows and rely on those services to keep a copy and I also keep local copies of everything (except Google Drive cause it ain’t work like that). I also upload all photos to Flickr as yet another backup.
Mobile + Speedy option
I really really like the Samsung external SSDs for stupid fast, lightweight space say for a laptop or larger projects that you need in your backpack but can’t fit on the internal drive.
Last model I bought was:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01AVF6UO8/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1
But whatever T model number there on I’m confident is as good or better than my old version.
I haven’t had any issue with these but SSD are more money and also have a built in max number of read/writes so they also will die eventually.
Keeping the ship running
So hard drives die and I basically buy a new $150 drive every 2-3 years and replace the most important one and demote the last one to the new time machine drive and retire the old time machine drive. This saves me from something breaking unexpectedly I replace before they get there.
Issues with my system
I don’t have a truly rotating backup offsite. I am working on getting a safe deposit box and plan to store old drives monthly in case of fire, flood, robbery at my house. So again make your own decisions but this is how I do at the moment.
I’m not super concerned with security at this point in time. I mostly want to be able to get my projects and photography back in case of loss. So keep that in mind when planning your own system.