I like to think of myself as a power user but have been slow on upping my backup game, and find organising my ‘big buckets of storage’ a bit bamboozling anyway.
I currently have at 512SSD MacBook Pro, backed up with Time Machine to a 3TB Samsung drive; I also have a WD 1TB with some music and video projects which also back up to Time Machine. Finally I have a 4TB drive which I use with carbon copy cloner to back up the MacBook Pro and WD drive (not sure if this is best sole use of this drive as it’s cloning rather than incrementally backing up?). I should keep this drive off-site but it isn’t right now . . .
I’ve also just got a Dropbox Plus account because of some work I’m starting, and am suddenly wondering what to do with all that lovely storage too. With all of this . . . what would you do?! I feel like I could improve the backup system and store things in different places to better use the storage I have but maybe it’s fine. Would appreciate hearing what other people do anyway!
P.S. Sorry I know this is fairly oft-visited territory on MPU/probably in these forums, just wondered if anyone had any suggestions for my specific use case. Maybe I just need to take the time and fiddle around with it until I’m happy!
A common bit of advice for data backup is the 3-2-1 strategy: keep three backups of your data. Two onsite. One offsite. Personally, I like to think of a clone as a separate kind of backup (so I follow a 3-2-1-1 strategy). The clone is a 100% backup and bootable. The others do not need to be 100% or bootable. For offsite, I backup to B2 using Arq.
I think you would want to have a 3-2-1 strategy for your MacBook, a separate 3-2-1 strategy for the WD drive. Draw a picture of the backup sources and destinations. It helps to focus the mind on what actions to take. And read the other threads here maybe?
By the way – don’t forget to test your backups. Boot from the clone. Restore big chunks (temporarily) from the backup destinations.
