Even though I have been in technology for many years, I never really had a personal storage strategy, and I would assume that not many people have put something like that together for their personal digital files. It’s just another thing to worry about. We just put all of our files that did not fit on our laptop on a 4 terabyte (Raid 1+0) disk drive. This drive contained photos, movies, document, and music. Loosing the data would be regretful, but to keep it in perspective, no one would die or anything. I would consider this lack of a strong backup strategy as "Backup Debt."
Two months ago, this same external disk drive overheated, and it did not work until it completely cooled down. It feel like it took a day or two to cool down. When it did start working again, I scrambled to try and backup all of the data on the drive using an online backup service. One hundred and seventy dollars later, all of the data on the disk was safely encrypted and stored on an online service.
I just wanted to share some of my decisions about how to preserve and manage your digital files. I have separated my digital files into 3 categories: files I don’t want to lose, files that I shouldn't lose, and files I don’t care about.
The files that I do not want to lose consist of family photos and movies. Losing these files would bring many regrets in how I managed my data backups, especially since I am a technology professional.
My highest recommendation for the management of your photos and movies would be to use Apple’s iCloud service. I have upgraded my wife’s account to allow for 1 terabyte of data. This should be able to store hundreds of thousands of photo and movies.
We had photos from the iPhoto days and even before. You need to get these into your Photos app on your Mac. It might take a day or more for all of the photos to sync up to Photo’s iCloud service, so be patient.
I would also recommend that you click to optimize storage on all of your devices. What this means is that if you added large files from your Desktop, it will only download “previews” or optimized photos on your smaller devices while the full resolutions photos and movies would be safely stored in iCloud.
On your mobile devices, you should upload all of your content to iCloud immediately. They call this “iCloud Photo Library.” This will prepare you for the moments that you drop your phone in the lake right after taking the perfect family photo, hopefully.
I would classify documents that you create that you probably shouldn’t lose as tax documents and other files that you collect as part of your household maintenance. If you lost the files, it would no question be a hassle, but you would live, and there is not any emotional connection with the documents. Another aspect of the type of data is that there might be sensitive data on the files. This prevents me from freely wanting to copy the files onto the most convient online file sharing application.
I would recommend that you make sure that all of your Macs connect and backup to a home time machine disk. The most convinent way to do this is to your Airport Extreme or with you Time Capsule from Apple. This means that all of your important files are on your computer, but they are also copied to a disk drive that is in your home. Two copies of files make them twice as safe. If your computer is also used at an office location that is not in your home, you may set up a Time Machine up at the office so that your data is stored in three place across two geographical locations. This will protect you from catistrophic events and inconvenient disk drive crashes.
If your files are too big for you laptop, then you may want to copy them to the drive you use for your time machine backups and physical media like an external drive or DVD’s. Time Machine will not backup your external disks, so be careful when you do this. Make sure that your files are in two places and do not create a burden requiring . I am sure there are some encrypted only services that you could use to back up these files safely.
This is the hardest one of all. If you create on your computer, you have all sorts of files that may not be a problem if you lose. As you work, I would recommend that you prune all the files that are not important in supporting your final work. If you love to keep files around then your “Backup Debt” will increase as you continue to work. This is the hardest because it take discipline to keep things tidy.
I found that in my experience, that avoiding my home backups for so long cost me a lot of money, and could have potentially lost a lot of memories. Think about your data and develop a strategy for your own classifications of data. Today, it does not take a lot of effort or money to keep your data from stealing $170 and a weeks worth of time from you.
Tarsnap — A UNIX users dream backup tool: Command line, Encrypted, and stored in the cloud.
Time Machine — Software built into your Mac that will take hourly backups and store them on an external drive.
Time Capsule — Wireless base station with storage. Works with Time Machine.
Airport Extreme — Like Time Capsule, but without the disk space.
iCloud — Apple service that integrates with Photo App to store photos and movies.