Paul Henman sysadmin Backups, 2018 edition

Backups, 2018 edition

It’s been a few years since I described my set up which included Windows machines, Western Digital MyBook drives, and Backblaze. Since then we’ve retired all the Windows machines, and the MyBook drives are gathering dust – we’re now all MacOS, iOS and ChromeOS, with backups going to two Netgear NAS boxes but Backblaze is still in the picture.

When I returned from England, I noticed there was a firmware update available for one of the NAS and I thought it would make sense to update it before I turned on all the other devices. You know it didn’t go well, otherwise I wouldn’t bring it up! I even got a mention on a TekThing episode. 🙂

It’s taken a while to restore and reorganise all my data, but now everything (other than intentionally temporary files) is on one of the external drives attached to the Mac mini, from where it’s backed up to Backblaze, as well as copied to a NAS box. Clean and simple. (The only “complex” piece is the scheduling of cron jobs to rsync data to either the NV+ or RN104 NAS.)

This also means my “paranoid” process for backing up photos is simpler: camera -> Mac mini -> external drive -> Backblaze and NAS.

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