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I’m not the most tech savvy and wanted backup on an external drive for graphics heavy work and photos. I remember the challenge of making my last external drive compatible and especially deleting old files, so I was a little anxious trying to find a solution.
In case it helps someone else, I work primarily on an iPad Pro in a design program (Affinity) and needed a backup storage solution besides the Cloud. I didn’t really want a second cloud solution to be backup and can’t use an external drive with the iPad. I also have a MacBook, which has massive storage, but can’t be backed up to ICloud, while the ipad can backup to iCloud. My workaround for immediate file saving is to create shared files which are stored on iCloud (I call them Desktop) on the ipad. Desktop is stored on the hard drive of the MacBook and gets updated via ICloud device sharing even though I can’t initiate an iCloud backup from the MacBook.
Inside Desktop I have labeled files as usual and a parent file for graphic design from the Ipad, broken down into 100+ named project files and sub files. Whenever I save from the ipad, I save to Desktop (in iCloud) and then choose the appropriate file within Desktop to save. This way I have the folders on the hard drive of the MacBook as interim backup, and am working around not having iCloud backup storage available when I’m on the MacBook. The T7 comes in as secure and portable physical data storage.
The T7 drive is the hard copy backup of the files shared between the iPad and MacBook, I think necessary in case of some dreadful software issue, fire, or other unanticipated loss of access. I plan to have more than one as soon as I can afford it, to rotate.
Again hopefully this may help someone like me who spent some solid hours figuring out a better way to secure my data and workaround the Mac user experience.
Since I am wanted to do manual backups I needed the process to be easy so I wouldn’t avoid doing them, for obvious reasons. Though we don’t need to get into it here I don’t want to use Time Machine on my Mac to back up the disk. So I had to figure out something else.
The T7 is great, easy to use, no time at all to install, self explanatory pretty much. I dragged folders full of work from the desktop (yes I like to see them, don’t judge) to backup. The initial backup was very quick and painless, most files were a few seconds. The graphics heavy files perhaps took about 10 minutes? These are massive, not a problem, and may have been quicker than this, I expected it to take more time. (My last iCloud backup was over 13 hours of anxiety - I kid you not and have since deleted almost all the working files from the drawing app after saving them in Desktop so they happen more quickly now, but still, I thought this was a daylong project).
I experimented with dragging an old file to the trash from the T7 disk pane, and it worked as expected. I had to read online about how to go about copying my photos library (Mac) to disk, but it wasn’t hard. I have over 40,000 images, and it took about 20 minutes as I recall, if longer probably max 25. I tested the backup by remaining in the open pane and opening the photo files, which worked. Amazingly all this data barely touches the capacity of the drive, maybe 10% or less of a TB? Minuscule, anyway. 2 TB is overkill for me, especially since old files can easily be deleted.
(This may be different for a user in Time Machine because it keeps multiple versions of your backups, and maybe more settings etc. which can take up a lot of space?- not tech savvy, as I said, but I had trouble with my older system and Time Machine and being unable to delete backups which rendered my backup disk unusable, and I didn’t want to deal with this again even though it’s less convenient to do it manually).
I think the T7 drive will fail before I need more space, which is a great problem to have. I’m planning to get another disk (with less storage) and use it as a failsafe backup- ideally storing it in a safe or out of the house just in case, and keeping a rotation to protect against loss.
On the critical end, I’d love it and think it would be much safer for data if the user pane of the T7 was visibly different from the one on my desktop. It’s the same color, font, everything, as my desktop window (maybe that’s just how these things work?), which makes me triple check when I’m deleting or updating. Don’t do this on a Friday night after an adult beverage….
I’d also love it if there was a simple tutorial available when you opened the disk up, just for ease of first use, a how to (experimented with a throwaway file deleting because it wasn’t obvious that dragging files to the trash would work) for most, and as a reminder for others. I hesitate getting one for my parents because of this. But I’m happy and will buy another, looking forward to the peace of mind it gives me.
| RAM | 1 TB |
|---|---|
| Hard Drive | 1 TB Solid State Drive |
