March 31, 2016

My current and upcoming backup plan

Today was Backup Day. Every few months a friend¹ calls me asking for help when a laptop dies, or goes missing with all their photos. Trying to recover data from a damaged or lost drive is expensive or imposible.

For a fraction of the cost you can have a pretty bulletproof plan:

Overall backup:

1. Time Machine: 1 TB external drive I keep at work
2. Backblaze: backups everything.

Files specific:

1. Dropbox: All my files live in Dropbox folder + my desktop folder is symlinked.

Photos specific:

1. iCloud Photo library: in my work MacBook Pro and MacBook server at home.
2. Google Photos: sync app running from Macbook at home.

Upcoming updates:

1. Use Arq to upload photos to a third online location (Dropbox since I’m already paying for 1TB plan).
2. A second external drive to alternate with the work drive.

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1. Sometimes more than once for the same person — looking at you Shaggy.↩︎

Setup

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