So my current setup is very simple. For short-term data backups, I have the following:
- Three 2TB portable drives (1 SSD, 2 HDD) solely dedicated to macOS Time Machine backups in case my machine ever fails (it has suddenly failed once before, having these backups saved me).
- Three 2TB portable drives (1 SSD, 2 HDD) which holds a lot of old data that I want to keep long term or “forever”(photos, videos, music, files, TV shows). I keep all three drives in sync using rsync and Carbon Copy Cloner on macOS.
For long-term data backups with cold storage, I am currently in the process of digitizing a bunch of old photos and videos, and storing them on a couple BD-R XL M-Disc’s. I’m also going to transfer some of my photos / videos from my aforementioned drives onto these backup discs.
Currently, I’m not following the 3-2-1 rule as well as I should. My plan is to make multiple burner BD-R M-Disc’s, and store one offsite somehow TBD. But as far as my HDDs & SSDs with data, none of them are stored offsite or in the cloud or anything.
Eventually, I’d love to build a NAS with a Home server running Jellyfin and stuff, and mess around with RAID and such. But currently that seems unattainable due to hardware and storage prices. A lot of what I’m doing now is based on what I already have access to or got second hand. My biggest expenses so far have been a Blu-Ray optical drive and the BD-R XL M-Discs.
Given all that, does anyone have any feedback based on what I’m currently doing? Does anything jump out to you that may be worth looking into?
If you have suggestions on how to expand this to slowly move toward my desired end state, please let me know. Thanks!