There are some great programs and services for keeping files in sync. Personally I use Dropbox, but I have also used Live Mesh with great success. These services are great for managing a limited amount of files, but what if you need to manage a lot, like my nearly 100GB Lightroom photo collection on my Mac Pro?
I have a 1TB Storage drive and a 1TB backup drive on that machine, but being someone who has lost a lot of photos in my lifetime, I also like to have an off PC backup and an off site backup. How can I accomplish this you ask? Silverkeeper helps me with the first part, Home Server and Cloudberry solve the second part.
I have Silverkeeper, a free Mac based backup utility from LaCie, set up to do two backups daily. The 1st backup copies my library from my storage drive to the backup drive. The second job backs up the hole library from my backup drive to my Home Server’s user folder.
Once the photos are staged there, Cloudberry does the magic of syncing the photos from my home server to Amazon’s S3 service.
I am sure at this point you are thinking, “My God is that overkill.” The sad part is that I have lost so many originals to my favorite photos over the years due to failing disks and simple mismanagement of files, this solution is nearly fool proof.
When Microsoft drops the latest version of Home Server with native OS X backup support, I will probably take the second backup off and do the backup to home server via native means, but for now, this works well.
If you have a Mac, and want to backup files to another location, PC or Mac, this free utility is from a reputable company and definitely worth checking out.
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Nope I don’t think it’s overkill, I can’t rest easy until my important data is in three places at once!