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How can I ensure automated back-ups of all my data without manual intervention?

My data lives on a 160GB MacBook internal hard drive, three 500GB external hard drives, and a 500GB network attached storage device (DNS-323).

One of my 3 externals is a 500GB TimeMachine, but it can only hold 2 weeks worth of some of my data. I have to tell it to ignore my music, which is very important to me.

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"Every day, man is making bigger and better fool-proof things, and every day, nature is making bigger and better fools. So far, I think nature is winning." --Albert Einstein – Grant Aug 14 '09 at 14:17
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3 Answers

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While foolproof is a pretty lofty target, I would recommend sticking with a OSX's Time Machine feature, but replacing your NAS, Time Capsule, and other external drives with an HP MediaSmart Server.

With current drive sizes, you can get 8+ TB of storage in the MediaSmart, and they have full support for Time Machine backups. They're fast, reliable, powerful, and a good value -- certainly a much better option than the Drobo for just about any home storage/NAS scenario I can think of.

There are a lot of other great reasons to go with one of these, too -- see more raves (from me and others) about them in these answers:

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Those look pretty awesome. They beat the pants off my DNS-323. – lo_fye Aug 14 '09 at 18:31
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up vote 3 down vote

Perhaps this is a stupid idea, but why not swap out the 500 GB time machine hard drive for a 2 TB hard drive? That way, you wouldn't need to exclude your music.

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I don't have a Time Capsule, just an external USB 2.0 harddrive. Works fine with Time Machine. Yeah, I guess 2 TB drives are a lot cheaper than they used to be. – lo_fye Aug 14 '09 at 18:21
On the downside, a non-RAID, non-Cloud backup can fail. 2 months ago my iPhoto Library became corrupted, and when I went to restore from external HDD backup, I found that it had a hardware failure. Hence my desire for something a little more robust. – lo_fye Aug 14 '09 at 18:29
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up vote 1 down vote

You may want to look at a Drobo, and a few cheap terabyte drives. Mac users seem to love those things.

I've heard from Mac users that have used BackBlaze successfully by putting terabytes of data up on the cloud. I couldn't find a way to easily say only backup these folders, which was disappointing. If a disaster happens they will mail you your data instead of having to download it all.

I use a combination of a local backup run nightly and JungleDisk, but for that quantity of data it would be pricey.

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