Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

Recommendations for Home Hard Drive Backups

One of our teachers asked me for advice on what hard drive to get at home to backup pictures, documents, music, etc. She has an Apple laptop from school, so if your family has Windows users you might skip the first recommendation and go to the second one. This is what I emailed her.

At home we invested in an Apple Airport Time Capsule wifi hotspot and router, which is expensive but it serves as a wireless backup hard drive that connects to Time Machine software on our Mac laptops… and backs up automatically whenever laptops are plugged in to AC power. Depending on the size you get it costs around $300:
www.apple.com/airport-time-capsule/
UY NO! Lo q hace uno para backup-ear su by @N3T1O, on Flickr
Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License   by  @N3T1O 

If you want a less expensive but still good option, a couple weeks ago I purchased a 1 TB Western Digital My Passport Ultra hard drive for $70. Amazon sells this for $66, they also sell another version for $59. It’s best to reformat these drives (they ship formatted as “NTFS”) to the “MacOS Extended” format first. This tutorial explains how.


You can alternatively go with a cloud-based backup storage option. Carbonite is the one my parents use, but it requires a monthly or annual subscription free. This is the safest option in the event of fire or tornado, since your backup is offsite/in the cloud.
www.carbonite.com

This is a 9 minute video I made a couple weeks ago discussing these and other backup options, which might also be helpful:

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One response to “Recommendations for Home Hard Drive Backups”

  1. James Sigler Avatar
    James Sigler

    I use a 3 TB WD Mycloud drive. It has an ethernet port for direct connection to the router. It also has a USB port for connecting a 1TB backup drive. WD included a backup option to Dropbox. Since We have more photos than anything else, I backup all our photos to Google Photos and back up all other files to Dropbox. That way, I have 3-2-1 backup. 3 different backups in 2 different locations with 1 offsite backup.