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so Linus via LMG clips got me to finally start working on setting up backup to my photos mostly (the rest of my stuff is on google drive more for cross platform accessibility then backup) my thinking was: step 1 - consolidate step 2 - clean up trash and duplicates step 3 - buy a HDD step 4 - get program (???) that will sync the two. full disclosure sorry about my English its mostly self taught. so step 1 only took me about 3 days, but this morning i finally finished it. step 2.1 was meh, google photos dosent have a "not" option so I cant just go: not family> select all> delete (although searching "screenshot got rid of like 70% of WhatsApp trash) so i sifted through 30G by hand, yuck, but thats also over, but 2.2 i.e. finding duplicates is not working, i just cant find a program that will sift through my google photos, they all want me to download > clean > upload again. it just sounds so wrong, got to be a better way. step 3, yeah cash flow issues, mabey next month. step 4 - help? i dont even know what these are called. TL;DR - i need help finding a photo duplicate detector program that can run with google photos. and i need a syncing program for a future HDD and google photos. thank you for your time, also it was a bit of a shock that I'm now a "dont touch the magic box because it might stop working" kind of guy befor the age 30, i do hospital stuff, not PC magic.

I am looking to get a very large hard drive that I can image a variety of disks to for backups. I want it to be internal Sata interface because I use hotswap bays. Does anyone know a good hard drive that I can use to image around 10tb or more worth of data onto. I want the hard drive to last a VERY long time and have good data endurance for things like being powered off for long periods of time. Does anyone know of any good high capacity, high endurance 3.5 hard drives? I do not care about factors such as noise or speeds (providing it is fast enough to do backups in a relatively timely manner) thanks in advance:)

I'm trying to use this software here at bootup so I can use the system image file I created through it. https://www.easeus.com/backup-software/tb-home.html

Hello I wanted to do a daily incremmental backup of files that are on a specific folder, to an external storage. The overall size of the entire folder ts around 40GB and its composed of small, but very important Documents, Pictures and PDF's. I really have fear of crypt and other malicius viruses that will make my file illegible, cripted or damaged, even after copying them to an external storage, so I wanted to take every precaution of this world before copying them into the external storage. 1) Which avaiable setup will make the "incremental backup process" 100% secure that I will not overwrite the good files on my external SD Card, with infected by virus files coming from the Laptop Folder, and so to lose everything? 2) There is any copy and paste suite for backups other than explorer.exe that maybe will make the PC to scan before copying, or to scan for each files? 3) What's your advice?

Hi, i'm using backup and restore on windows 10, and want to make sure my old system image on a 2tb external hard drive isn't overwritten. Is there any way to let them both be on the external hard drive in separate places?

Hi guys i work for a small buisness and as of yet we dont keep any backups or have any redundant storage. We recently suffered a drive faliure on the pc of our office administrator which has led to lots of data being lost and now we are looking into preventing this in future however we are only a small construction buisness with 3 office employees and mainy only store client files, priceings for jobs, invoices etc. and i was hoping for some tips on what the best soloution would be if its worth investing in a NAS or just backing up to a couple of external hard drives every couple of weeks. thanks in advance.

Fellow Techies, I have all my sata ports on hotswap and when I eject (using windows) the hdd I use for backups and pull that drive out, my other mass storage hdd disappears from My PC and Disk Manager and I have to restart the pc for it to be accessible. If I put the backup drive back in, after I boot the pc or when I decide I want to do a backup, it doesn't even show up on Disk Manager. WTF is going on? Thank you in advance.

Hi, This may sound like a newbie question but should I tick the prompt in Makemkv to decrypt backup option or leave it unticked when backing up a movie? Cheers.

This question is for all of those who use software on a routine basis to manage hard drives, by either copying/cloning, migrating from one size drive to another, using multiple operating systems, and backing up all files to images or otherwise. I am looking for the best utility in the industry, I am sick of having to resort to using multiple tools to accomplish what I try to do when it comes to managing hard drives for my clients. Basically, I use the Disk Management tool by Microsoft extensively, however it has it's limitations and does not do a hell of a lot when it comes to resizing, cloning, and etc. If I can't do what I'd like to do with DiskMan, I will use either Minitool Partition Wizard, or EaseUS Partition Master. I have also used Macrium Reflect (i like this one a lot), Acronis TrueImage, Norton Ghost (11.5 seems to be the best version), and even Carbon Copy Cloner and Super Duper! However, when it comes to migrating a certain size HDD that is larger than a destination SSD, I seem to have issues. Like for instance, I'm working on a clients Macbook pro and it only supports up to OSX 10.6.8 which is not only lame, but frustrating because I can't for the life of me get any of the clones working with any combination of utilities that I use. I do happen to have some hardware cloning tools, where I can put the master disk in the first slot and then the destination drive in the 2nd, then hit the clone button... but that doesn't work when the drive is smaller than the original drive. (I know I didn't put clonezilla on here but I just dont like it. I really don't dive deeply into too many Linux programs although I do use LCMint or Ubuntu a lot to recover data from 'failed' drives) That's where this post began to formulate in my head. Why not ask Linus and friends what they think is the best of the best when it comes to migrating larger sized hard drives to smaller ones (especially an OSX drive) There's a good chance that I'll finally get this working at some point, maybe even after I hit the post button... but either way, I think this would be a great discussion to have with all of you and i'm looking forward to hearing some of your input. Thank you very much, hope to hear from you soon!

So, I'm using Server 2012 R2 to host a network share for CAD workstations, backing up client computers, access to folders with group policies, blah blah blah. I have an automatic backup every day at a certain time, and have about 6TB to play with. I'm afraid it will fill up after 120 days (~50GB/day.) How do I delete daily backups at the end of the week so I'm only left with 1 per week of the month, then after the month is over, delete the 3 previous backups for the month? I'm also interested with setting up the Azure Cloud Storage for the weekly backups, then doing the same thing as the local server for the 3 previous weeks, so any suggestions for that would be appreciated.

So I've been doing some research into how much people backup their data and what the odds are of their backups actually coming in handy, as I've never really understood the whole backup culture that exists in the tech world. I have no backups of any of my files and thankfully I've never needed one, so I decided to do some research and make a video on the subject. So I just want to know, if you are aware of the percentages and likelihoods of different types of drives failing, please do let me know, and also let me know if you backup your data, if you do, what kind of data is it, and how much do you recommend both normal PC users and more advance users backup their data?

Update: Upon independent investigation by Users on the Apple Support Communities, using MacOS Extended Journaled Case Sensitive for your backup drive appears to fix the issue. Time Machine creates incremental backups of files that can be restored at a later date. It allows the user to restore the whole system or specific files from the Recovery partition or other macOS recovery environment. Time Machine is an incredibly important software of macOS. It has saved countless people who otherwise would have be SoL from data loss, theft, malware/ransom ware, and all other situations where a user might have lost their data. Since the release of Mojave however, over 69 users (80+ now) have reported that Time Machine is unable to complete a backup. I and may other users have been experiencing a similar issue, and assuming that Mojave did not magically kill over 80 drives, Mojave is the common factor. Seemingly over night people have been unable to make backups, obviously a big problem for anyone serious about computing. namuang26 on the Apple Support Communities made a thread where [he] described an issue very similar to my own: Another user by the name of sjordi made a discovery that could potentially be the cause of Time Machines issues: According to the above statement, it would appear that Time Machine no longer stores its work data in the Shared/adi folder and has instead elected to use a different location. As Time Machine attempts to make a backup of the users computer, that work file increases in size and Time Machine attempts to back it up, cascading until there is no more room left for Time Machine to make a backup, causing the process to fail. I can also back this statement up seeing as the folder does not appear to be increase in size during the backup, which it should be doing under normal operation. I reached out to Apple and spoke with a Senior Tech to provide a statement. My Technician, Colin, was very helpful and ensured that these concerns would be looked at by Apples engineers. He also helped try and isolate the issue by having me run their CaptureData.app to log for errors during an attempted Time Machine backup. I was told to upload the relevant info (the logs and a screen shot of the error) so the Engineers could take a look and then he would reach out to me to follow up and tell me what the Engineers had to say. However upon following up with them later in the week, I was informed that their recommendation was to remove 3rd part programs that might be causing issues. Not an admission that macOS Mojave had a bug or that this is an error on Apples end, which at this point it clearly is. I was told to remove programs like HyperDock, Transmission, and HPs easy scan utility for "testing purposes" and was told that these recommendations do not mean that these apps are at fault. I was also told to install Malewarebytes and run a scan to ensure that the computer had not been infected with anything that could be preventing Time Machine from making a backup. Of Course after running the scan my system is clean. further removal of these apps did not resolve the problem. It would appear to me that the Engineers did not look through my error logs and simply did not bother to investigate this very serious problem simply because there were a few 3rd party apps that have never causes issues for me before installed on my machine. Because of this I am extremely disappointed with the customer service and the importance of user feedback. However please do not blame the representative that I spoke to. Colin was an amazing rep, the blame goes to Apples "Engineers" unwilling to take a hard look at the issues facing Apples customers. Apple has currently not publicly acknowledged that this issue exists. However they have seeded a beta for macOS 10.14.1, but there is no mention of Time Machine in this beta. I have reached out to Apple on Twitter to provide a statement. I will update this thread as more information becomes available. Sources: Apple Support Communities Thread: https://discussions.apple.com/message/33970553?start=0&tstart=0 @DrMacintosh sjordi on the Apple Support Communities namuang26 on the Apple Support Communties Colin, Apple Senior Technician (please don't make this a dumpster fire, Lol)

Hello all, Here's my situation. I have two Western Digital Black 6TB hard drives (WD6003FZBX) in RAID 0. I'm thinking of purchasing a 12 TB hard drive (WD Red or WD Gold) to use as a backup of my RAID 0. Is this possible? Is this a dumb idea? How do I go about doing it?

So in a recent video Linus showed how he used his resources and his servers. He showed off his "lifesaver" where if he created a file on a server (example whannock) within seconds it would be backed up to the petabyte server (don't quote me on that) I'm wondering what software is used to do that and how I can incorporate that for my usage. Thanks!

Just a friendly reminder to those of you running FreeNAS - enable email alerts. Got the dreaded degraded email :-( Without the email I probably would've never really noticed (until much later anyway) Little extra tid-bit... even spare drives can fail :-( Can't help but feel anger at seagate... within 1 year I had a disk fail - I replaced it with a HGST and RMA'd the dead disk. Upon receiving the new disk, I decided to keep it as a spare.. Well here we are another 2 years later and another seagate disk bites the dust. Phew I think, I have a spare. Pop the spare in... write errors galore after a couple hours of resilvering. 3 dead seagates within 3 years. Maybe I should've tested / burned-in the disk I got from the RMA, really wasn't expecting it to be dead. Thankfully I have a second separate volume for backups, but stinks to have $160x2 (originally paid) get flushed down the toilet. /end rant

I am looking for a cloud based service that i can backup my files for my business and wanted to know if anyone had any suggestions or experience with a service. I have terabits of data so i definitely would have to be an unlimited service and with an auto backup. I have found KeepVault Pro and BackBlaze, anyone have an opinion on the two, they seem to fit the bill, but I've never used a cloud based backup before. Trying to be more diligent with my backups, 3-2-1, right.

Hi, I'm just after some advice. I'm going to be getting a laptop soon to be used in school, currently, on my desktop, I have 3 hard drives: One is my main drive One stores 'other files' such as images etc One acts as a backup drive (windows file history etc) When I get my laptop is there any way I can get it to backup to the backup drive on my main rig automatically (i.e. set it and forget it)? I also backup to one drive for some files (documents and images) but would like to avoid this as I've got sync software on my main rig which sorts all the important stuff and backs it up to one drive Thanks all, Sam

can i reinstall windows without clearing out my second hard drive, i dont mind wiping the boot drive but i dont want to erase all of my games and have to spend hours reinstalling all of my games and syncing the save data just to find out i didnt have to go through a ton of bullshit

Hello guys, I have a pretty simple question. What are the pros and cons of doing a partition on a drive vs having two drives. I want a 1 tb partition for a time machine backup and the rest as mass storage. I want to run the WD My Book Duo in a raid 1 for redundancy.

Hey guys, My iDrive subscription is expiring in 2 months and the renewal for the 2nd year is at $70 US for 2 TB of storage. I am looking for something a bit cheaper and was wondering if you guys have any suggestions. I am looking at BackBlaze which at $60 is not too bad but wondering if there is something better. I really do not have that much to backup, definitely under the 1 TB mark, I would actually even say i am under 500 GB. I also do have 1 TB of OneDrive storage with my Office 365 however from what I remember no applications support encrypting the data in OneDrive yet since the API does not support it (this my have been changed) What are your thoughts/opinions.

I am using google photo. However my cellphone is Nexus 6p. So when I store the photos online, google will compress it to smaller ones. For example my original photos are most likely to be around 3MB. After I uploaded it to the cloud, it shrinks to 1.8MB. Just by looking at the photo I cannot tell a difference. I'm just curious that what service/software do you guys use to back up your family photos etc.

When I'm trying to get my blu ray backups to play in plex they detect all wrong is there something im doing wrong or do I need to encode m media?

Hey everyone, I have a interesting dilemma and was curious what my options are. Here is what I am trying to do... Problem: I need to backup both Windows and Mac machines some of which have hardware raid 0 arrays. I am unable to find something that meets the bellow list of what I want / need it to do. What I would like the backup to do: Backup to a household server running Windows Server 2012 r2 Standard Backup both Windows and Mac machines Backup entire HDD/SSD/Raid Volume Schedule backup times NO CLOUDS! If anyone has any suggestions please post bellow. Thanks.

Does anyone have any recommendations for good backup software that supports rotating USB drives? The system is Windows 7, not domain joined. I want to be able to swap out USB drives each week and get a fresh full backup as well as nightly incrementals. I also don't want to have to go in and manually delete old backup sets.

Hi once again LTT community, I feel kinda embarrassed asking this question so don't be too harsh on me: I have a NAS at home that I use for movies, music, family media and backups. Now I haven't got any of my backups also cloned onto the cloud because if someone got into my online account they would easily have access to VERY IMPORTANT WORK DATA. So what I have done as I searched around google to find that there was a local datacenter in town which is hosted by an ISP, they offer hosting, storage and cloud solutions. So I kinda wanted a second opinion on this before I ask for a quote. Questions: 1. Is it worth bothering to do so? or a waste of time? 2. What are the negatives for going for a local datacenter? and what are the positives? 3. I'm fine if you wanna also leave your own 10 cents in the comments aswell, thanks for the help!