Optimizing iMac Storage Strategy

September 15, 2021 2:34 AM

I am interested in improving my iMac storage / backup strategy. I have come from nothing 5 years ago to what I think is a decent strategy, but I would like to know how much further I should go to optimize it.

I have a 1TB SSD iMac filled with 950MB of data, divided approximately:

- 300GB documents (1000's of hours of writing and research)
- 200GB iPhone backup
- 200GB Movies (all family movies transferred from old formats)
- 100GB Photos (all family photos since the dawn of digital)
- 100GB Music (burned from CD's into iTunes over the years)
- 50GB Other

For the past 5 years, I have kept an external 3TB HDD doing continuous Time Machine backups.

For the past year, I make a bootable copy of my entire iMac SSD on to a 1TB Samsung T7 SDD using Carbon Copy Cloner which I keep offsite in the safety deposit box - - I bring it home to update every couple months.

Now, I would like to know what the next best step is.

For example, I have read that it is better to keep SSD's not filled to the brim with data. If I wanted to keep some of my lesser used data off of the iMac SSD (eg 200GB family movies), how then is that best backed up in my existing Time Machine and bootable clone strategy?

posted by fairmettle to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

The offsite idea is a good one, but of course you may end up a couple of months behind in the event of a major catastrophe.

I supplement a similar setup with an online automatic backup service. The one I use is BackBlaze, but there are others.
posted by yclipse at 4:02 AM on September 15, 2021 [2 favorites]

I came in to say BackBlaze as well. I use TimeMachine like you do; since I have many computers I have important files copied between them using Resilio Sync; I have photos backed up automatically to Amazon Photos since we have Amazon Prime and it comes with; and then back everything up to Backblaze.
posted by procrastination at 4:16 AM on September 15, 2021

With the caveat that a working copy is another copy and not a backup with files at rest in a secure place, do you want a new hobby maintaining a disk array on your home network?

Spinning rust is good for streaming video once each large file is written and gets read many more times than written. Then you want redundant and inexpensive disks so that the failure of one isn't ruination of the data spread across those disks. I like RAID6 for 'two spares can fail without loss of data' so that you still have redundant protections against one more failure while replacing a dead disk. Devices like Synology, QNAP and others will put a number of disks into a storage pool with configurable levels of redundancy.

Also: nthing offsite such as BackBlaze.
posted by k3ninho at 5:44 AM on September 15, 2021

For example, I have read that it is better to keep SSD's not filled to the brim with data.

That's mostly only because SSD write speed drops precipitously as they get fuller and writes need to shuffle around existing data to make room, as it were. It's not really a huge problem for archival storage.
posted by Kyol at 6:22 AM on September 15, 2021

Response by poster: I appreciate the time and thought given to the answers to my question.

I did forget to mention that I have not been using online backup solutions due to data constraints in my situation.
posted by fairmettle at 12:33 AM on September 16, 2021