NOTE : If you can't be bothered to read this whole thing then please just skip to the last paragraph So, up to now I've just stored everything on my laptop and backed up via an external USB hard-drive. The external drive is, i think, pretty much the same memory as my laptop so for backing up it just manages the job. However, i'm starting to run out of memory as I download all my films and store them on the laptop as well as music, games, and photos. My solution to this was to buy a Time Capsule (2 or 3TB memory) and begin to store the rest of my media on there as it's wireless (obviously i know other hard-drives are wireless ) so I could still play my movies on apple tv without plugging the hard-drive in. But then i had a bit of a problem... If i store all of my media on a time capsule, they won't be backed up. So even though i would be backing up the films actually on my laptop, the films i then store on the time capsule once i run out of room would be vulnerable to being lost if the hard-drive was ever stolen or broke. Obviously, 3TB worth of films is going to be a very expensive collection to replace if that happens. So erm... what do i do? It seems crazy to buy an external hard-drive in order to backup my external hard-drive :lol: . Thanks in advance to anyone that can offer any better ideas (*hug*)
It seems crazy not to. That or back them up to over 600 DVDs which seems like an aweful lot of work and not to mention more expensive. I think a secondary external hard drive soley for the backup for the primary external hard drive is the cheapest and easiest solution. Tape backup used to be a viable way to backup and it still is if you have enough data you want to backup but the drive alone will cost you in the $1000-3000 range. Hard drives are so cheap now whereas 10 years ago it would cost $400 just for an 80 GB drive. There are also online backup solutions. I've never bothered to look at prices or storage limits but the idea of trying to squeeze that much data down the pipe seems really inconvenient to me. Maybe it's just because my ISP sucks.
It will be more expensive, but go with a solid state drive as they are less prone to failure. Won't help much against theft though .
Any external USB drive can be set up as a Time Machine disk. I've got a large 2T drive with one partition devoted to backing up my system, and with media on the rest of the drive
Thanks for the replies guys, adam88, i know you can use external ones - i currently backup my laptop to a usb hard drive (only 320gb so not large enough to store media also). However, i want the drive i use for media (so the time capsule in this case) to be wireless for various reasons, and to be honest, i think a time capsule would be the best bet in that case as like a lot of apple's products, i think it'll be a lot easier to set up and use as i'm not really that smart when it comes to technology. On the other hand, i had another idea recently. A lot of the media taking up space on my laptop is tv shows, i was thinking that i could just delete them and then play them via iCloud on apple tv or re-download them if i wanted to (i have checked and the tv shows i have are compatible with iCloud storage and playback etc). I just don't know how secure it is? My fear would be that (god forbid) the iCloud/iTunes network fails one day and i lose access to all my shows? i DO have the receipts stored in my gmail account and exported in their raw, pure data form onto my laptop though... Wow i didn't realise how much i'd written... Thanks for reading if you got this far!
