Faraway, So Close

Crys­tal (web­site, twit­ter) emailed me this ques­tion regard­ing back­ing up her work:

I was hop­ing you could give me some tech advice/​suggestions: how do you back up your work? Exter­nal hard dri­ves, I’d imag­ine? Do you store them on DVDs as well or is that anti­quated? My one and only exter­nal hard drive decided to quit work­ing today and I store ALL of my stuff (includ­ing com­puter back­ups) on it. I’m kind of freak­ing out. I can mount it tem­porar­ily but there’s a lot of GBs on there that would take hun­dreds of disks to back up to. So would it make sense to back up my exter­nal hard drive with another exter­nal hard drive? I need some­thing that makes the most sense, is cheap, and takes lit­tle space on my desk. Please help!

My advice to Crys­tal went some­thing like this:

• Bite the bul­let and buy another hard drive. $130 or so for plenty of space to back up your data. Hav­ing local backup that you can quickly access if you need to is impor­tant. Plus with Time Machine run­ning you can very eas­ily grab a pre­vi­ous ver­sion of a doc­u­ment if you make a mis­take on one file — rather than hav­ing to re-​​install every­thing to get it back.
• I use a paid Drop­box account to store all my client files (images, HTML/​CSS files, con­tracts, meet­ing notes, etc.). Besides being an off­site backup, it makes it really easy to access some­thing on my iPhone with the iOS app.
• Finally I use Back­blaze to keep a backup of my Mac­Book Air. Back­blaze oper­ates in the back­ground, con­tin­u­ously back­ing up every­thing impor­tant on my lap­top. Since I have a Time Machine backup hard drive at home con­nected to our iMac that I only occa­sion­ally con­nect to my Air, it’s nice to have another backup run­ning in case a week or two goes by.

Backup. Backup. Backup.