Backup (locally and in the cloud) for an M2 Mac

[Erik Petersson]

Hi!
I have a few hundred gigabytes of data, mostly scanned negatives. As the archive grows, I am looking for a practical and safe backup solution.

Until now I have used Time Machine, but also backed up "manually" to an extra external hard drive. I want to switch to automatic backup both locally and to a cloud service.

Now I am testing Backblaze cloud storage and Chronosynk backup software, both as free trials. I am not how sure well they two fit together though. Any recommendations and thoughts are welcome!

 

[koraks]

@Sean might have a suggestion for you. Maybe he can chime in if he can find time.

 

[Sirius Glass]

Time Machine will do automatic backups but you can improve the safety factor by locating Time Machine on its own dedicated drive. That way if your main drive goes bad, Time machine is isolated from the main drive. I do that and have done that since 2000.

 

[blee1996]

Time Machine on a local USB hard disk, plus cloud backup (I use Google Drive). Since you are not over 1TB yet, cloud storage is still affordable.

 

[Steven Lee]

Hard drives aren't great at retaining data which isn't frequently accessed. The bit rot is real. My suggestion is a modern NAS like QNAP or Synology for local backups like TimeMachine. They also do periodic data scrubbing and can repair most bitflips or faulty disk sectors. Also, both have the capability of automatically backing themselves up to a variety of cloud storage providers. You will have 3 copies of everything: on your computer, your NAS, and the cloud.

 

[BradS]

Why not use Apple's Time Machine and an external SSD or HDD connected via USB?
I don't see any reason to bother with third party products.

 

[Erik Petersson]

Thanks everyone for your tips. For some reason, Time Machine does not work flawlessly for me. That's why I am lookin into other ways to backup.

Steven, thanks for pointing out NAS, I had not heard about that before. Might be interesting.

 

[EricTheReddish]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Carbon Copy Cloner. I find is useful for doing backups to external drives, in addition to my Time Machine backup.