Do you do backups? Were you ever saved by one? What is your strategy?

[Wildebeest]

My recent experience is related to a Tahoe upgrade on my MBAir 15".
All installed, ready to go, I ran a TimeMachine bacup as I do before and after each upgrade.
All was well until I forgot my password. I forgot to update it on Dashlane app that takes care of things not to forget.
I managed to crash the Mac. It went into full Rainman mode: "Oh-oh, problem problem."
Genius shop failed at first as they tried to install Sequoia on a drive that had remnants of Tahoe.
This is in Réunion Island, we are a bit slow here.
"Do you happen to have a recent backup?" Well, I did and handed over the emergency-yellow LaCie disk from my bag.
With the cable, of course.
I fetched the fully functional MBAir following morning and made a backup.
Smooth sailing ever since.

I can plug a TimeMachine volume on my Wi-Fi but it will be slow and it poses a security problem.
The smart thing to do would be a local network Synology NAS that can be configured to serve as a TimeMachine volume to take care of your backups and more. It is an overkill in my situation.
I'll stick to my weekly local hard disk backups.

Tell me about the BU strategies and equipment you use.
Were you ever saved by a backup?

 

[Unframed Dave]

I don't understand much of that, I assume a lot of it is related to apple products, which I don't use.

Everything gets saved to onedrive, I can access all my snaps on any device anywhere I have WiFi or data.

Costs me around £18 pounds a month, which includes all the usual Microsoft products and 2 TB of storage (I pay for an extra TB). My wife is also included. I regularly use PowerPoint and excel, so it's reasonable.

 

[Wildebeest]

I don't understand much of that, I assume a lot of it is related to apple products, which I don't use.

Everything gets saved to onedrive, I can access all my snaps on any device anywhere I have WiFi or data.

Costs me around £18 pounds a month, which includes all the usual Microsoft products and 2 TB of storage (I pay for an extra TB). My wife is also included. I regularly use PowerPoint and excel, so it's reasonable.

Time Machine is Mac specific while Synology NAS is cross-platform.
One Drive and Google Drive are cross platform. One Drive is tuned to Microsoft users while Google Drive is not committed.
You picked no-nonsense solution that serves you well.

 

[THXGEEK]

Win11 PC user here.

I use Acronis True Image for backups to my local NAS (48TB) - Full backups monthly, incremental backups weekly. I also maintain two 4TB external SSDs which are used for peace-of-mind 'just in case' backups of critical files (finance, legal, etc). I'll also blow copies of archival photos to the NAS. I have also made a habit of making a copy of my cameras' various memory cards (again to the NAS) before I reformat that card.

I keep everything on my side of my firewall. I have zero faith in the privacy guarantees for any personal data that Google or Microsoft (or anyone else) might access - no doubt all of their various AI engines are busy sucking up anything and everything they possibly can.

 

[Wildebeest]

Win11 PC user here.

I use Acronis True Image for backups to my local NAS (48TB) - Full backups monthly, incremental backups weekly. I also maintain two 4TB external SSDs which are used for peace-of-mind 'just in case' backups of critical files (finance, legal, etc). I'll also blow copies of archival photos to the NAS. I have also made a habit of making a copy of my cameras' various memory cards (again to the NAS) before I reformat that card.

I keep everything on my side of my firewall. I have zero faith in the privacy guarantees for any personal data that Google or Microsoft might access - no doubt all of their various AI engines are busy sucking up anything and everything they possibly can.

That's impressive. What is your estimated weekly volume in shots or in megabytes?
Who is your client base, what is your field?

 

[THXGEEK]

That's impressive. What is your estimated weekly volume in shots or in megabytes?
Who is your client base, what is your field?

My full backups run about 3.5TB, increments are largely dependent on whether or not I've been able to get some free time the previous week to take some pics.

I am an IT Security Manager and do disaster recovery planning (among other things) for my company.

Professional words of advice: TEST YOUR BACKUPS! All the technology in the world can't help you if your backups are done incorrectly.

 

[evacguy]

Back in November, my 3 year old laptop had a serious crash - the SAMSUNG 4 TB SSD failed (controller chip died), I've lost everything. My automatic backups to OneDrive were not working as I'd exceeded my 1 TB limit, my manual backups to TEAMS have partially failed (so I've discovered) for some unknown reason, even though I can see the files on TEAMS, I just can't access them, and my secondary manual backup to an external hard drive were too infrequent (months out of date) due to lazyness. A retrieval company has managed to retrieve most of my data - so I am told - at a cost of about £1800. I'm still waiting to get into the retrieved disc. It's a hard and painful lesson to learn, but you can't have enough backups.

This is one of the reasons I've been AWOL for a while, along with being swamped with the day job! I still have to reinstall PS and LrC on my repaired laptop.

 

[iamdlewis]

RAW files are backed up to a local NAS with redundancy daily. JPEGs are backed up manually to two external drives (6TB and 12TB plus have a 20TB that i haven't figured out what to do with) and also to Amazon Photos whenever I trigger that which is at least weekly. The Amazon Photos is good for sharing us it is unlimited storage as part of Prime. I also use OneDrive as a quick share for what I want to send to my phone and general large files.

 

[Chris 3754]

Back in November, my 3 year old laptop had a serious crash - the SAMSUNG 4 TB SSD failed (controller chip died), I've lost everything. My automatic backups to OneDrive were not working as I'd exceeded my 1 TB limit, my manual backups to TEAMS have partially failed (so I've discovered) for some unknown reason, even though I can see the files on TEAMS, I just can't access them, and my secondary manual backup to an external hard drive were too infrequent (months out of date) due to lazyness. A retrieval company has managed to retrieve most of my data - so I am told - at a cost of about £1800. I'm still waiting to get into the retrieved disc. It's a hard and painful lesson to learn, but you can't have enough backups.

This is one of the reasons I've been AWOL for a while, along with being swamped with the day job! I still have to reinstall PS and LrC on my repaired laptop.

Yikes!

 

[Chris 3754]

I use a bit of a manual process and should probably look to expand my cloud solution also. I keep my photos on a Scandisk 4TB. Here is my workflow:
1. Copy photos from camera card to working SSD using Lightroom Classic
2. Edit photos on working SSD in Lightroom Classic, then backup to another SSD using FreeFileSync, then format the camera card
3. Weekly backup of the 1st backup to another SSD using FreeFileSync
4. Computer-generated files, such as Word docs, saved PDFs, etc., are automatically backed up to OneDrive

FreeFileSync allows you to save backup processes so it's just a matter of doing backup #1, #2, #3 etc.

 

[THXGEEK]

Yikes!

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