Wondering if anyone has any tips for a simple backup solution for our small charity.
Hardware
3 x latest 16" MacBook Pro laptops
3 x external hard drives (these are not paired with a specific laptop but regularly used with different laptops)
What we want to backup
The crucial data is mainly audio and video session data (always stored on external drive)
Ideal solution
Free or cheap solution
Plug in a backup drive (one for each of the three external drives) and hit backup on Time Machine.
Doesn’t require a fast internet connection (we are often out in the community with limited access to fast internet)
Questions
To use time machine in the way described above, would we need to pair each drive to a machine? (e.g always backup external drive 1 using laptop 1).
To make sure that I understand your situation: it sounds like you have 3 laptops and 3 external drives. Each external drive contains data you want to preserve, eg you audio and video files. Each laptop can be connected at any given time to any one of the three external drives to store data, so as such, your important data is spread out over the three separate external drives, with no one place containing all of the data at any given time.
Presumably there is also data on each laptop that you also might want to preserve/protect, although you implied that this is not the case when you said that your audio and video data is always stored on external drive.
Given this situation, there are a few different approaches you might consider.
Perhaps the cheapest would be that IF each of the three drives is large enough to store all of the data from ALL THREE of the drives, you could set up a system in which each drive is cloned to both of the other two drives on a regular basis (frequency depending on the rate of data production). You would need to basically connect all of the drive to one laptop at any given time and clone each drive to a folder on each of the other two drives, or set up a shared folder on each drive that is brought into a bidirectional sync with the other two drives. This way you have, once completed, three identical drives all holding all of the data.
If your drives cannot each hold all of the total data, then you are looking at buying at least one, if not two, additional drives that can hold the total data. You can set those drives up as TM drives and plug into each laptop sequentially to run the TM backup (or a clone or any other system you want).
Even more expensive would be to obtain some sort of NAS system which can serve as a TM destination for each of the laptops. The problem with this is that your NAS storage has to be very large compared to the drive utilization if you continue to connect external drives to multiple laptops, because if all three of the drives are connected to each laptop at some point, then that laptop’s TM storage will have the contents of each external drive and there will be three such TM stores in the NAS, so you will have a lot of duplication and need a lot of extra space.
I would propose that a better approach would actually be do dedicate one drive to each laptop, keep them together, and not use them with each laptop if that is at all possible. If not, another approach again is a central store and smaller external drives (or use the internal drives on the laptops) and download the needed files when working and sync back to the central store when done.
I am not sure there is any easy zero cost solution unless option (1) would work for you.
Is that external drive with all the critical data specifically always used with one of the laptops or do you move the external drive from laptop to laptop?
How many terabytes of data do you have on that external drive?
Knowing these facts might make it easier to suggest solutions.