Airport Xtreme hard drive backup

[auerbock]

Here's my situation:

Up to this point, I've kept all my photos on the hard drive of my Mac, with a Time Capsule backup to an external hard drive, which I fairly regularly switch out so that I have a copy offsite that's mostly up to date; not perfect, but I think reasonably safe.

It would be great, though, to be able to access all the photos from multiple computers, so I just bought an Airport Xtreme, and have it hooked up as my router, with a hard drive attached to it so all our various computers can access it as a server. So far so good.

However, if I'm going to keep all my precious photos on an external hard drive, I'm really worried about backups - what is the best way to arrange a continuous backup of that external server hard drive?

I'd prefer to have it be a physical external drive, since there are about a terabyte of photos on there, and I'd like to avoid paying for cloud storage for that amount of data, but tell me if I'm just going to have to suck it up and do cloud storage.

I'm not incredibly tech savvy, so fairly step-by-step help would be much appreciated.

 

[Altemose]

Let me see if I understand this correctly.

You purchased a new AirPort Extreme and connected one USB hard drive to the USB port on it. You now use that to hold photos and other data while connected to your network. You want to backup the contents of that drive, correct?

 

[Weaselboy]

I'm really worried about backups - what is the best way to arrange a continuous backup of that external server hard drive?

The app Carbon Copy Cloner will copy networked drives like that. Just setup the source as your networked drive and the destination as your external backup disk then run the task. There is also a "schedule task" option so you can save the task and have it execute on a schedule or automatically when the destination disk is attached.

 

[auerbock]

Altemose - that's exactly correct

Thanks Weaselboy, that sounds like the kind of thing I need

 

[Altemose]

If you setup Carbon Copy Cloner on a desktop it will probably work best. Otherwise, just remember to plug in the backup drive.