For the last few years I have primarily relied on my iPad Pro 12.9 for all my work related to my photography and video work. This has meant utilizing cloud storage for pretty much everything. I use a few external SSD drives for storing raw video that I’m not using but its really a patchwork of various solutions.
Tomorrow I’m picking up a new MBP 13” with 512 SSD. What I’m hoping is that someone can point me towards a process that would allow me to create a reliable way to store and back up everything while still making things easily accessible to both the MBP and the iPad.
I’m open to pretty much anything. As long as at the end of the day everything is safe and backed up and the physical storage can be easily used to auto backup my RAW image files.
Probably the easiest, simplest path is keeping attached storage connected to your Mac and using Home Sharing to share files.
I believe Apple also initiated Media Sharing with Catalina (I’m still on Mojave), which seems to be part of Home Sharing (and/or a partial-renaming of it) - but I’m a little fuzzy on how it all shakes out.
You can share your Music and TV libraries over a local network so that anyone on your local network can browse and play music from your library, as well as movies and TV shows in your TV app. It also lets you copy Mac files to their libraries, and works with iOS as well as letting you stream to AppleTV hardware.
One advantage to this is that it’s a simple matter to do regular Mac backups (and automated background cloud backups with a service like BackBlaze).
If you want to get more complicated, the main alternatives would probably be sharing cloud-based files, or buying a Network Attached Storage (NAS) box and using that to serve files to all iOS and macOS hardware.
I work much the same way. My iPad Pro is my primary computer and I have a Mac mini that functions primarily as a server. Almost all my files reside on the mini and are synced to either Google Drive or iCloud so everything is also available on my iPad. (Sensitive records are encrypted and remain on the Mini)
I keep copies of tax records, birth certificates, and passports, etc. in 1Password. Everything is backed up to an external usb-c drive and to Backblaze B2.
A few scripts and Hazel on the Mac handle basic filing for me so there is very little maintenance needed other than verifying backups, and keeping everything updated.
That would be terrible. So, IMO, you need make at least 2 more copies. When it comes to important data: “one is none, two is one, and three is better”
Meaning if you have only one copy of your photos you have an excellent chance of losing some or all of them. But if you download all of them to your new Mac (or perhaps an external drive) that’s better. And then if you back them up to a service like Backblaze you should be in pretty good shape.