Massive Hard Drives Are Cheap, But Not Easy
Ever since consolidating my office and moving to a Mac Pro, I’ve been taking advantage of how inexpensive hard drives are. I’ve got two 500GB drives in the Pro, a Drobo with 4 1TB drives, an external 1TB drive, a 500GB drive hooked to my Airport Extreme, and several sub-500GB external drives.
This is great. I can store videos all over the place, load up lots of music and audio, have everything everywhere.
Then I start to think of backups. How do I back up all of this stuff and store it off-site? Almost impossible. Even if I have more drives to do it, it still takes a long time to backup 1TB of data, let alone multiple TBs. And a lot of the stuff on the drives is junk, render files and scratch files and duplicates. Backup programs don’t make it easy to do a selective backup.
OK, so new plan. I’m cleaning it all up. I want to end up with my two internal 500GB drives, one Time Machine drive, and one off-site backup. That’s it. Gotta sort through it all and organize. Gotta figure out which one is the Drobo — probably the Time Machine drive, though that is a waste. Redundant backup of my backup? Which also has an off-site backup? I’m not that crazy. But I’ve got the thing, so I should use it.