Episode 133
The Backup Show
March 23, 2018 · Mike Murphy
EP133: THE BACKUP SHOW In today’s episode, I am going to share my start to finish backup and digital organization and management system. Episode Summary: Practical tips for you to get started take control of your digital data and develop a rock-solid backup plan. The tools I use for backup and organization. My current backup system and workflow for all of my devices.
Episode Summary: A start-to-finish walkthrough of Mike’s 2018 backup and digital organization system — the tools, the hardware, and the redundancy strategy behind protecting years of podcast episodes, videos, photos, and business documents.
What You’ll Learn
- 3 practical tips to take inventory and get control of scattered digital data
- The exact 2018 hardware and software backup system Mike used, start to finish
- Why redundancy (a cloned drive plus offsite cloud backup) matters more than any single backup
- 4 pieces of parting advice for building a backup system that actually protects you
This episode piggybacks on Episode 132: The iCloud Show.
A question worth sitting with: if a backpack with your laptop, iPhone, iPad, and an external hard drive got stolen out of a parked car right now, could you recover your podcast episodes, videos, photos, music library, and business documents?
Practical Tip #1: Take Inventory
Figure out where all your digital content actually lives, and gather it in one place — consolidating from internal drives, thumb drives, external drives, Google Drive, and Dropbox. Create one folder (a “2018 Backup” folder, for example) and organize by big-ticket categories: Videos, Photos, Documents. The goal is a single master folder to back up.
Practical Tip #2: Clean House
While consolidating, delete anything no longer needed — unused applications, desktop and Downloads folder clutter, loose files in photo/movie/music folders. Store documents in Documents, not on the Desktop. Toss any empty external drives that are several years old.
Practical Tip #3: iOS Devices
Clean up iOS devices and export all photos and videos to consolidate with the master photo library on a desktop or laptop.
Tools Used
ChronoSync ($50) — a Mac utility that scans two drives or folders and reports the differences, so you can copy over exactly what’s changed and keep a backup as an exact clone, saving significant time.
SuperDuper ($30) — similar to ChronoSync, with scheduled automatic backups between two external drives, keeping a cloned backup running continuously without manual tracking. Mike’s preference: SuperDuper.
The 2018 Backup System
iPhone and iPad — automatically backed up to iCloud (contacts, notes, messages, photos). Photos and videos also get exported via Image Capture to a Mac and imported into Adobe Lightroom for management.
MacBook Pro — backed up continuously via Apple Time Machine to a drive connected to an Apple AirPort Extreme, physically separate from the computer. If the laptop failed, everything could be restored from Time Machine almost immediately.
External drives — LaCie Thunderbolt drives, bought in pairs: one for active work, one as a clone kept in sync via SuperDuper or ChronoSync. Fast, quiet, and reliable, though genuinely fast multi-TB SSDs were still pricey at the time, making Thunderbolt/USB 3.0 the practical choice.
On the desk: a 6TB LaCie drive plugged into the laptop, daisy-chained to an identical 6TB clone that never leaves the desk, plus a portable 4TB LaCie Rugged drive for client work and travel.
Backblaze ($5/month) — a cloud backup service continuously backing up the main 6TB drive and the MacBook Pro (on top of Time Machine and iCloud), similar to Carbonite. Nearly 3 years of reliable, set-it-and-forget-it use at the time, with occasional logins just to confirm everything’s still working.
Recap
MacBook Pro → backed up via Time Machine over WiFi. A 6TB LaCie drive holds all working media — the digital hub — mirrored by an identical clone drive for redundancy. Backblaze continuously backs up one of the 6TB drives offsite, so a fire, theft, flood, or hurricane doesn’t mean losing everything.
The Final Piece: Google Drive
The last layer serves productivity and backup at once: upgrading a G Suite account to the $10/month business plan, unlocking 1TB of Google Drive space for personal and business documents, photos, and music libraries — everything except video, which stays on the local drive system due to file size. Cloud-based and accessible from an iPhone anywhere, this update rounds out the whole business’s storage needs for $10/month.
Parting Advice
- If you’re already backup-savvy and diligent, well done. If not, at minimum use Apple Time Machine on a Mac — it has saved countless accidentally-trashed files.
- iCloud Storage at $9.99/month for 2TB can back up an entire computer, accessible from a phone app or browser.
- For G Suite users, the Google Drive storage upgrade (roughly $5 extra/month at the time) removes dependence on external hard drives for anything but video, and Google’s search makes finding files fast from any device.
- Invest in good external hard drives if you’re a content creator — fast read/write speeds and a solid connector type (SSD, Thunderbolt, USB 3.0) matter a lot, especially for video editing.
Moral of the Story
Back up your digital world — it matters, for both personal peace of mind and business continuity.