I should really start doing regular backups again, do the 3-2-1 backup strategy again, and organize my backups but there’s so many files and stuff on my devices and external drives that it’s overwhelming and I don’t know how to properly sort it. ADHD kicks my ass too and I know that it takes a while to backup and that means my computer needs to idle so it can get done faster and doesn’t slow my computer down.
Also, I’m struggling with cloud backups too. Google Drive and OneDrive often had errors in the middle of uploading and I’m hesitant to spend money on a cloud service. And doesn’t Backblaze need you to have your device connected at least once every 30 days or your data will be deleted or something? I have ADHD and I can’t guarantee I’ll be on top of that. And do I upload image backups to these servers? Is that even possible? What about video game backups and other large files? Or all the videos I have? Aren’t these cloud services really slow as well? I feel like I’ll end up having the same problem…I could use zip files, but I keep worrying something will get removed in the middle of it.
And how do I check backups? I can’t reasonably check every single file I’ve ever made.
I don’t know how to handle all of this. I mainly use FreeFileSync for copying drives over with anything being overwritten just being moved to a Revisions folder. I also sometimes use Macrium Reflect for image backups, but the free version is being retired… I tried Veeam once but it didn’t backup the AppData folder when I tried doing a file level backup about a year ago.
I have a Mac and a Windows computer by the way. I do want to check out Linux someday though.
I don’t know if I can do a NAS either. I don’t think I have an extra computer lying around and I’m a college student who needs to travel from home to my college campus. And I don’t have a lot of room on my bedroom desk…And I hate how backups often prevent me from using one of my computers.
How much data in total do you need to backup?
Secondly, backups need to be setup to happen automatically, otherwise you will forget about them.
In terms of NAS, you could just get a raspberry pi, and attach a big portable drive via USB. Should be small enough so you can carry it around, plus you can set it up to do automatic backups into the cloud.
In fact, you can even setup different backup scripts that run, whenever you plug in a different drive into the raspberry pi. Each drive’s filesystem would have unique identifier ID, so you can easily create a script the reacts to whenever that drive is plugged in and run a different script when a different drive is plugged in. e.g. lets say you have one drive you always want to sync with the cloud, and another that you just want to sync with a drive on your NAS.
Lastly, you should always consider how important is the stuff you are backing up really. If it’s easier to re-create/re-download from other sources as opposed to the time and effort for backup&restore, then that stuff doesn’t necessarily need to be backed up.