Hood Productions LLC Video and other media production

Backing your files up is an absolute, must do. Over the years I have developed a pretty good system that is also affordable. Since I couldn't afford the latest and greatest RAID 5 setup with multiple drives I went a different path.

Forget about using DVD's to back up your data! Hard drives are cheap now and so much faster to backup to than DVD is.

Here is my Mac based setup. I'm sure you could find a similar setup for PC's.

Step 1: Purchase two identical OEM hard drives and enclosures. Format them and name them something like "Tulip 1" and Tulip "2" (Please, feel free to not use the name "Tulip")

Step 2: Get a copy of ChronoSync (it costs $40)

Step 3: Setup ChronoSync to perform a synchronize bidirectional backup of the root folder on your two drives. What this will do is anytime a file is modified, it will only copy that updated file to the other drive and leave all the other unchanged files on the drive alone. This eliminates the need to continually make backups of whole project folders and keeps everything simple.

Step 4: Every time you work with some files on your first drive and make some changes, just run ChronoSync and your second drive will be up to date in a matter of minutes (or hours depending on how much has changed).

It is easy to add more storage for your files, just purchase two more hard drives and repeat steps 3 and 4. No need to purchase any more enclosures either, just swap them out with the first two hard drives you already have in enclosures.

You could even add a third drive to the setup to have an offsite backup of your files. Just setup ChronoSync to synchronize bidirectionally with a third drive and keep that drive offsite as an emergency backup.