Deleting 60GB of important information
 

The 500GB drive on my iMac is close to full which creates problems like Photoshop can't create a scratch disk...

I have 60GB of past job pics, most of which are important to critical. Needing to free up space, it's the best folder to delete. To save it, I've backed it up in Time Machine. Put a copy on an external SSD. Uploaded it to Amazon Prime photo storage (thanks Scott, who knew).

Can you think of anything else I should do "just in case." Only thing I can think of is put it on $20 flash drive.

You can always set any attached drives as additional scratch for Photochop and even set the priority it uses them.

As in use external 1 1st, external 2 second, internal 3rd etc….

Back in the day in a pinch Id even used Syquest optical carts. Slow as **** but it worked when you had no other options in the middle of the night with a morning deadline.

Shaun -

As said, use an external drive for scratch stuff, use USB3 or lightning/thunderbolt/whatever mac is calling their specialized superfast i/o bus this week.

If you really have critical files, then I'd suggest two pairs of external USB drives (500gb to 1tb, depending on how much you need to store). Mark them as A1/A2 and B1/B2. Two local copies and two remote copies. Two because hardware failure happens.

Copy everything to A1 and A2, and put them in a remote place (ie, your home if this is a office, or your office if this is a home - if you are only working from home, then a friends house, safe deposit box, etc). Since you are on a *nix-like machine I'd look into either a GUI front end for rsync or getting friendly with the terminal. Using rsync will be good when you go to update your archives since it can be set to update changed files and add new but not remove deleted (what you'd want for regular use). Or it can do a complete mirror (what you'd want to start a fresh backup to a clean drive).

Plug in B1 and B2, and use rsync to keep them updated on a daily/weekly basis.

Next time period (weekly, monthly, quarterly etc - only you can decide how much data you can afford to lose) swap out B1 and B2 for A1 and A2. Update A1 and A2 to be current, and continue.

Repeat, alternating between the two sets.

This way you always have two local copies that should be extremely fresh and should disaster strike (fire, etc) you have a remote copy that should have just about everything critical except current work and you aren't tied into any cloud provider or other account lock-in, dependent on network access, etc.

I think the data he is concerned about is legacy stuff, not changing, he's just afraid to lose it.

Time machine does all the necessary incremental style backups as well and while I love my friend Shaun and think he's one of the most intelligent people I know he should NOT be using rsync. :D

You have two friends named Shaun? :D

I think I'm going to get another T7, copy and paste and call it a day, thanks guys.

The reason I am so skitterish is I have 3 Seagate drives with all of my Traveler Kids stuff and other things I'd love to access. All them are toast. $1400 each to retrieve data because clean room.

IF THE iMAC is newer

It should have an m2 slot
now apple the SOBs that they are use a style m2 NOBODY else uses
you can get an adapter to use a standard m2
anyway the new m2 drive is way way faster then the older SShd
it should be simple to add a m2 but apple needs the imac taken apart

and you should have your old spin HDs in raid to copy not the stupid time machine [wife has one]
yes they sort of ''work'' but 90's level tech now as they copy everything ever time stupid when all is needed are the things changed
not a complete copy of everything every time

You saved all of tabs’ posts?

Just remember if you're really concerned that making extra physical copies is almost moot if you just throw them all in the same desk drawer. Put a copy in a different building.

That is good advice, thanks.

Steve, the gravitas of his posts alone would mean I'd need a google server farm. :)

Amazon can provide you that.

Geeze I wish i had a clue about what you are all talking about.

Your wife has an Airport Time Capsule.

We are talking about Time Machine the app which fully supports incremental BUs.

If it is not too late, I would suggest getting a dual drive docking station that can plug into a USB drive and buy a couple 3 or 5 TB hard drives and use one for temp files the other for backups or moving files you don't need any longer or very seldom. If you do this, make sure to "disconnect the drive" and not just unplug things or files may get corrupted.
John

burn files to a DVD (or two) - far more durable and portable than SSD or jump drive
Be sure to test the DVD before storage and put one in an off site place like your bank safe deposit box.

He would need a crane to lift up 60gb of storage on DVD’s.

60 gig / 3 gig per dvd (figuring some wasted space on 4.3 per dvd)= 20 DVDs
What's the problem?

Ok. I haven’t seen a DVD in years, so they must have improved from when I last used them.

You may be thinking of CDs which are 800k

Good lord don't burn DVDs. Come on man.

Put that 60gb in the cloud like you already did, and on your time machine and copy it to a nice fast SSD or even a $50 spinner from Best buy. Copy it to a 64GB USB stick and throw that somewhere else. done.