Good thing you asked about this Kirupa! I’ve been struggling with this issue ever since I lost my 2 drives (1TB each) of insanely important work. Still got the drives safely hidden under my bed, hoping to recover it one day :sigh:
But thankfully, I’ve found the solution I’m most happy with and never looked back since. I’ve read all of your suggestions and it seems I’m the only one doing it this way.
I don’t use Drive, nor Dropbox, nor One Drive, nothing of what’s been mentioned.
What I do:
- Local backup (cloned by atleast 2 external drives)
- Cloud backup (of the same data)
Frequency of backups depends on personal preference. Explained as follows:
Step 1: I work from my laptop that contains all of my current projects (approx. 500 GB of data). I have 2 external drives that clone all new and modified files on a real-time or scheduled basis (which can be set). The software I use for this is, Bvckup 2. It’s one awesome program that does one thing PERFECTLY. Copies files from ‘source’ to ‘destination’ in sheer perfection. Be careful with this though, once over-written there’s no looking back. So in this case, I’ve got 3 copies of my work synced at all times: Laptop, External Drive 1, External Drive 2.
Question is, what if my house burns down and I lose everything? Well,
Step 2: www.backblaze.com
It’s a tiny little program that backs up everything on your computer on a real-time basis, always. BB offers unlimited storage, MAC / PC compatible, 30 day backup versions < This is amazing as you can revert any file you’ve accidentally overwritten if it’s within the 30 day period. Price? 5$ a month. Well worth the buck!
The great bit is you can connect and sync unlimited external drives and UNLIMITED STORAGE. There’s a lot more to this, which you can read on their site.
Only catch?
- No NAS drives (I can live with that)
- You should always sync your drive atleast ONCE a month. Else they wipe it off their servers.
I’ve been doing this since a year now and am loving it.
@senocular I’ve had issues with redundant files too. You can get some third party software to compare files and filter out the unwanted.
Hope this helps!