How do you manage your data

[JamesMay82]

Just curious how people are managing data these days with such small internal drives on Macs…especially music and photo libraries.

Are most people keeping large libraries on external SSDs and only plugging them in when needed? Or relying more on cloud storage now?

I’m not really a fan of cloud storage because I worry accidental deletions or sync issues can spraed across devices. But external drives can be a pain too ans easy to forget, and they seem to complicate backups.

Interested to hear what setups are working well for people.

 

[Mrbobb]

I data backup to HDD on my LAN. a few times a year is enough, my data is not business-critical and don't need to be current by the day. The HDD sit on in a 4-bay USB enclosure with the HDD easily shapable. If your data is critical, then you may want to backup more often and store it off-side, like cloud, or use another family member's house for backups.

Data backup and Disaster recovery are 2 separate things and another topic.

 

[jz0309]

Just curious how people are managing data these days with such small internal drives on Macs…especially music and photo libraries.

Are most people keeping large libraries on external SSDs and only plugging them in when needed? Or relying more on cloud storage now?

I’m not really a fan of cloud storage because I worry accidental deletions or sync issues can spraed across devices. But external drives can be a pain too ans easy to forget, and they seem to complicate backups.

Interested to hear what setups are working well for people.

I got my M1Max Studio with a 4TB drive as I wanted to have my photo library on the main drive, currently using ~ 1.7TB so I have still room to grow.
My movies/music are on an external 2TB SSD (never gets unplugged) that is close to 1.9TB now, but I have not added much in the past couple years, so I might just delete some of the movies I don't like to get me more space if needed.
I spec my main drive to my needs, it's worth it to me.

 

[eyoungren]

Well, my youngest Mac is a 2011 MBA and it already has a small drive. I use it as a utility tool to to clone backups, figure out issues, format drives, etc. It's running High Sierra so it's a decent bridge between newer Macs and my older Macs (PowerPC and Intel). It has a dock connected that has a Firewire port so I can boot PowerPC Macs in Target Disk Mode.

I have three NAS devices and several external drives. All computers under my control in the house backup daily to one of the NAS devices and weekly to the Dropbox folder on my Mac Pro.

Currently, I have several empty drives I'm trying to fill because I have more GB than I can shake a stick at. I always try to buy larger drives any time I need to replace an old one.

My music library is on my NAS and depending on the Mac I am using, there are three different apps I use for playing music. All three are capable of detecting any changes to my music folder and will reflect those changes on the fly. This lets me maintain ONE music folder between every single computer.

I do have a 2TB iCloud sub that is shared between my family members, but for me it is simply a matter of convenience. There is almost nothing stored on my devices that could not be replaced from a backup. For the stuff that can't, it's not valuable enough to me for me to care about losing it.

 

[Ben J.]

I have a 512GB internal and use it for apps and user accounts primarily. A few apps installed a lot of data that is almost never used, and by using DaisyDisk to find that data (~230GB), I have moved it to an external drive, and replaced the folders with symlinks. Simple, one time procedure, basically.

I have two 4TB and one 2TB ssd in 40Gbps external enclosures that are connected all the time, with both photos/videos/sample libraries/projects etc., and backups - so that if any drive should fail, I can replace it and restore its contents quickly.

I also have 3x2TB 2.5" SATA ssds with clones of everything, stored at my neighbour's house and updated every other week, in case of total disaster.