Tag Archive for: backup

rsync

A stylized illustration of a cheerful robot holding a stack of colorful folders in front of a large, open vault door. The robot has a blue and orange metallic body with glowing eyes. The scene is set in a futuristic archive with warm lighting and stacks of documents in the background, suggesting secure storage or organization.

When I first started learning photography, I used Aperture as my photo editor and management solution. But I was too dumb to use it right and accidentally deleted the only copy of many photos from the first years of my son’s life. Since then, I have been diligent, borderline fanatical, about having backup copies of family media and important files.

Determined to never repeat that mistake, I explored various tools for creating better backups. One of the most versatile tools I found is rsync, built right into macOS.

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Backblaze

Laptop, external hard drive, and cloud storage icon connected by glowing data streams with file icons flowing between them, illustrating multi-location backup redundancy

If you have a computer, you have a ticking time bomb. Some computers last decades before they have a catastrophic failure, some barely make their way out of the box. Whichever is the case, your computer will eventually fail and you will lose all of the data on that device. This outcome is guaranteed no matter who makes the computer, only the timeline is unknown. This means that you must prepare. 

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Dropbox

Three devices - laptop, tablet, and smartphone - connected by flowing glowing streams in a circular pattern, visualizing seamless cloud data synchronization

A long time ago I downloaded an app for my iPod touch (my phone was an LG Voyager at the time) to help me take attendance for the class I was long term subbing for. The app was cool at the time and is out of development now, but there was an option in the settings for that app to sync data via Dropbox. I had never heard of Dropbox before so I signed up for an account and that was that. Dropbox is now the very first app I install on a new device, I rely on Dropbox to save all of the photos and videos that my family creates, and most of the apps I rely on every day use Dropbox to function.   

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