[stomachmonkey]

Originally Posted by id10t

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.