best online backup for mac and multiple hard drives

#BEST ONLINE BACKUP FOR MAC AND MULTIPLE HARD DRIVES PROFESSIONAL#

Second, this hard drive is USB 3.2 and connects via USB-C (a much better plug than the wide “ Micro B Super Speed” connector that comes on many drives these days. First, it looks way better than WD’s black plastic bricks.

#BEST ONLINE BACKUP FOR MAC AND MULTIPLE HARD DRIVES PROFESSIONAL#

We picked this SanDisk Professional 18TB G-DRIVE Enterprise-Class Desktop Hard Drive for a couple of reasons. This is called “ shucking” and I’ve done it dozens of times with no issues, but if you have a real photography business with insurance and taxes and all that, just spend the extra money for NAS drives. The critical thing to keep in mind here is that you can buy an external drive, then break it out of its plastic case and use it in an enclosure, but this is risky and it voids the warranty. You’ll also have to decide whether to buy an external drive or a bare drive for use in an enclosure, which we’ll get to in the next section. For example, 20TB external drives go for about $25 per TB, 16TB drives go for around $20 per TB, and you can find 8TB drives for $15 per TB. Try to get the largest drives you can afford, but be aware that the biggest drives demand a hefty premium. The first thing you’re going to need is at least one hard drive for your backup, preferably two as outlined in the 3-2-1 rule above. We only include products that have been independently selected by Input’s editorial team. Input may receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article. Now that we know what we’re shooting for, what are our options? And how can we achieve maximum protection without spending a truckload of money? Fortunately, the price of storage, backup software, and cloud services has fallen dramatically over the years, and hobbyist photographers may not need to spend anything at all, depending on their needs and expectations. Of course, this doesn’t quite meet the 3-2-1 ideal outlined above, but it’s so much better than working without a backup at all. Many photographers have a drive that they work from (active storage), a backup drive located somewhere in their home (inactive storage), and a cloud backup.

This sounds like a lot on paper, but in practice, it’s a little more straightforward. This is why there are some best practices handed down to us by IT professionals, like the 3-2-1 rule, which goes like this: Create a primary backup as well as two copies of it (so three backups in total), and those should span two different types of media, and at least one should be kept off-site. But even then, companies shut down and are acquired all the time.

The most reliable storage is actually cloud storage because that data is being maintained by fleets of engineers in data centers. Why? Because all physical media fails eventually, and not just spinning hard drives, but SSDs and SD cards (micro or full-sized), too. When it comes to backing up your precious data - photography or otherwise - the name of the game is redundancy. In this guide, we’ll give you all the tips and tricks for backing up for every scenario, including natural disaster and burglary. And if you are a pro, not only do you need reliable backups, but you need a substantial amount of capacity, especially if you’re doing video. Even if you’re not a professional photographer, you should be backing up your photos.

Best online backup for mac and multiple hard drives