Ways to protect data on 2015 iMac

[bigcountry333]

I have never turned FileVault on - with only 117 GB left on the SSD, should I do that to protect my data? is that enough space?
Best way to protect data on an external 14TB drive? that's currently where I store photos and music.
I'm also paying the icloud $9.99 a month for storage that backups my SSD, but my physical computer isn't encrypted.

iMac Retaina 5K, 27-inch, late 2015
running macos monterey 12.7.6
4 Ghz quad core-intel core i7
32 GB DDR3
500 GB flash storage with 117 GB available
14 TB external drive for music and photo storage

 

[FreakinEurekan]

117gb available should be plenty for FileVault.

Not sure what you mean by “I'm also paying the icloud $9.99 a month for storage that backups my SSD” - iCloud doesn’t back up a Mac.

 

[kitKAC]

Not sure what you mean by “I'm also paying the icloud $9.99 a month for storage that backups my SSD” - iCloud doesn’t back up a Mac.

Probably Desktop and Documents being synced to iCloud.

 

[FreakinEurekan]

Probably Desktop and Documents being synced to iCloud.

Probably. And it's important to note - that is not a backup! If you accidentally delete a file - or even change a file - that deletion/change syncs to iCloud too. Data is NOT protected.

SYNC IS NOT BACKUP!

 

[iMac2019]

Best way to protect data on an external 14TB drive? that's currently where I store photos and music.

If you understand "protect data" as "backup" or recovering data if something unexpected happens, the main question to ask is: how important, valuable are your data, e.g can you afford to lose some or all of it?

Depending on the answer, several solutions are possible, from the simplest to the most complex, with costs in line with the level of security and availability required.

Another point to consider is the volume to be backed up or archived.

Considering an optimum 1Gbps Fiber Access constant, this amounts to transferring in the most favorable hypothesis, which probably doesn't exist in the real world, at the speed of around 100MBytes /s, i.e. around 3h per TBytes ...

Not to mention the cost of “this Cloud solution” on 14TB volume of data.

For a local solution, based on a SAN or NAS infrastructure, it is possible to obtain much higher speeds with NVme, SSD, raid0 based storage, or a mix of this, but this won't be cheap either,

In case of you are looking for some backup strategy or DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan) you may take a look at this thread :

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/time-machine-disaster.2431686/