[jyl]

The house computer here is a mid 2010 Mac mini, dual core 2.4 GHz. It was really showing its age, running very slowly with frequent spinning pinwheels. Last year, I increased RAM from 4 GB to 16 GB. Performance improved significantly, but application launch was still very slow and the pinwheel still appeared and stayed present for long periods. I started suspecting issues with the original 320 GB HDD.

Yesterday I decided to clone the drive to a 480 GB SSD, install the SSD internally, then download the El Capitan installer and re-install the OS. This took a long time, the cloning apparently went wrong, the Mac wouldn't boot from the SSD so I had to boot from the original HDD attached external and repeat the process. But now everything works and boy is this old computer feeling snappy! Like a new machine.

Have we had problems with SSD reliability? I could leave the old HDD connected external and do a weekly clone of the SSD to the HDD, to have an alternative bootup drive should the SSD fail.

Now to think about backup strategy. The internal drive, now a SSD, holds the OS, apps, and miscellaneous files. I keep the photo and music libraries on an external 2 TB drive. A second external 3 TB drive is my backup. I use TimeMachine to back up the internal drive and the libraries drive to the backup drive, and also every week I clone the internal and libraries drive to different partitions on the backup drive. The problem with this is that I only have one backup drive, so if it fails then I have no backup, and also that all the drives are cabled to the Mac, so if someone steals my computer they might take my backup drive too.

I could put another backup drive in a different room, use powerline networking to connect. But if the house burns down, I lose that drive too.

Anyone use a cloud service to backup 1.5 TB of data, affordably?. Which do you recommend?