In a world where you use so many words disproportionately, and in particular the word Cloud, never before is backing up your data is key.

If something happens to your computer, your smartphone, your camera cards, your camera cards… you would lose everything … your data, your memories, your work…

I know what most people think: “So much won’t happen to me, the data is safe on my hard drive, I have a copy in the cloud…” etc…

Well… I’m going to tell you something disturbing… none of these storage systems is secure, no one guarantees you the salvation of your data and especially when you activate one of these services, when you buy a hard drive or a card, the only guarantee that you are given is that in the case of some cards, in case of data loss or loss, they return only a new card…

If you are on my site it means that we have something in common, for example do 3D animation, videos, images, photography, and therefore losing your data can be a problem not a little…

Many of you have a backup system and feel safe…

well do a couple of researches on the loss of The ToyStory 2 projects, and then come back here… you may find that no one is safe since an incredible company like Pixar risked losing Toystory 2’s designs to a trivial filesystem problem, and they have hundreds of servers and technicians who trade themselves in handling and managing backups… Now…

I have a raid, I’m safe…

I happened to hear often these words, even I was convinced, too bad that it was precisely the raid that betrayed me 10 years ago, when identical disks (because supertechnics advise to take identical discs for raids, even better that they are with consecutive serials, so they work better, say the ignorant) abandoned me at the same time, so my mirror raid made me hello… through my tears …

Then I relied on a wider raid, with 4 redundancy discs, guaranteed by the super experts, too bad that this time the damage was caused by a firmware defect on new discs, an entire pallet of hundreds with the same defect, recognized by the parent company, but so much my data had died, which made sure that within a few minutes, the head began to crash into the discs , and in a short time the damage had spread beyond the recoverability of the redundancy raid. more tears shed, about 6 years ago…

A solution?

no one can have the ultimate solution, I can only say what I use as a solution for backing up my data, three copies of the data : one local on the computer, two on external hard drives, updated on alternate days.

Each block of disks is of different brands, of different manufacturers (some brands are produced by the same manufacturers, with the same chipsets and hardware), to avoid chipset and firmware errors.

What do I use to keep my backups up to date?

under windows and under mac there are several packages to check the synchronicity of the data, to avoid updates by hand, because it is not possible to remember every single file updated from time to time.

under mac I used an app called Syncron, good until you are under HighSierra, from Mojave and upper it give a lots of troubles, AVOID IT; under windows I use the AllWaysinch program. For both OS an interesting solution is FreeFile Sinc.

Both have automation systems to synchronize multiple folders both on-premises, network or cloud.

Edit 2020: Synkron seems to have not been updated by the author and does not work properly under Catalina, I suggest another interesting free product for Windows, MacOsX and Linux that is called FreeSync