this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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Does anyone have any recommendations for good backup software? My use case is pretty simple. I have an external usb drive I want to backup to every so often. Both the source and backup drives are 8TB capacity (I’m not even close to using the full capacity yet)

Normally the backup drive is left unplugged but I want to be able to plug it in run the backup software to copy across anything new then unplug it again for storage.

Simple file backup (not looking to do a full bootable OS drive backup or anything)

Thank you

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Adding to what has already been said by other commenters, if the data is really important you should consider an off-site backup in addition to your external hard drive backup. It could be Dropbox, Google Drive, Backblaze, a hard drive in another place, as long as you can recover your data in case your home gets robbed or destroyed (flood, fire).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

For these particular files I do also use Backblaze, that's definitely useful if a subset of files were lost but having to download an entire 8TB hdd worth of data would be pretty painful with Backblaze (their physical hdd shipping isn't really a good option as I'm not US based).

In this case as the external drives were on offer I bought two of them with the intention of the second drive to be the backup. The files here aren't really really important, but would be very annoying if I lost it all.

For my truly critical files (things like family photos, secure documents etc) I have other multiple levels of backup, both with synced cloud services and local backups just to be safe. Backups upon Backups upon Backups there! (3 - 2 - 1 and then some)