Easy Daily backup OF EXTERNAL DRIVES

mintmemory · Nov 7, 2013

Good morning!

I want to backup all of my external drives daily. I want a local backup on hard drives, as well as an online backup. Below is my proposed plan. Does anyone have a better idea, or an idea that will save me money?

$200 Mac Mini on ebay
360 Three 3 TB western digital drives
25 USB hub
30 SuperDuper! http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html
6 per month Crash Plan http://www.crashplan.com/

Then I will set it to backup every night before I go to sleep - and every night I will just plug all of my drives into it. SuperDuper! will give me the local copy on the 3 WD drives, and then I will set crash plan to backup those 3 WD drives (and leave them plugged in all the time, since that will be an online backup and will go slower - I will plug it in to the router though so it won't have to go wifi).

What do you think?
Is there a better way?

Lifeisabeach · Nov 7, 2013

We'd have to know more about why you have so many drives and what you are willing to spend. What you are doing sounds agonizing. Have you considered getting a RAID enclosure? You could get a 4-bay enclosure; drop the 3 external drives in it (unless they are Caviar Greens... not recommended for RAID); add a 4th; then set to RAID level 5 for striping and parity. If one drive fails under this setup, you just replace it and it gets rebuilt as if you never lost a drive. The RAID volume would be treated as a single drive, not 3 or 4 separate drives, which would make managing this a lot easier.

Easy Daily backup OF EXTERNAL DRIVES

mintmemory

Lifeisabeach

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