The Backup Show

Episode Summary: A start-to-finish walkthrough of Mike's 2018 backup and digital organization system — the tools, the hardware, and the redundancy strategy behind protecting years of podcast episodes, videos, photos, and business documents. What You'll Learn 3 practical tips to take inventory and get control of scattered digital data The exact 2018 hardware and software backup system Mike used, start to finish Why redundancy (a cloned drive plus offsite cloud backup) matters more than any single backup 4 pieces of parting advice for building a backup system that actually protects you This episode piggybacks on Episode 132: The iCloud Show. A question worth sitting with: if a backpack with your laptop, iPhone, iPad, and an external hard drive got stolen out of a parked car right now, could you recover your podcast episodes, videos, photos, music library, and business documents? Practical Tip #1: Take Inventory Figure out where all your digital content actually lives, and gather it in one place — consolidating from internal drives, thumb drives, external drives, Google Drive, and Dropbox. Create one folder (a "2018 Backup" folder, for example) and organize by big-ticket categories: Videos, Photos, Documents. The goal is a single master folder to back up. Practical Tip #2: Clean House While consolidating, delete anything no longer needed — unused applications, desktop and Downloads folder clutter, loose files in photo/movie/music folders. Store documents in Documents, not on the Desktop. Toss any empty external drives that are several years old. Practical Tip #3: iOS Devices Clean up iOS devices and export all photos and videos to consolidate with the master photo library on a desktop or laptop. Tools Used ChronoSync ($50) — a Mac utility that scans two drives or folders and reports the differences, so you can copy over exactly what's changed and keep a backup as an exact clone, saving significant time. SuperDuper ($30) — similar to ChronoSync, with scheduled automatic backups between two external drives, keeping a cloned backup running continuously without manual tracking. Mike's preference: SuperDuper. The 2018 Backup System iPhone and iPad — automatically backed up to iCloud (contacts, notes, messages, photos). Photos and videos also get exported via Image Capture to a Mac and imported into Adobe Lightroom for management. MacBook Pro — backed up continuously via Apple Time Machine to a drive connected to an Apple AirPort Extreme, physically separate from the computer. If the laptop failed, everything could be restored from Time Machine almost immediately. External drives — LaCie Thunderbolt drives, bought in pairs: one for active work, one as a clone kept in sync via SuperDuper or ChronoSync. Fast, quiet, and reliable, though genuinely fast multi-TB SSDs were still pricey at the time, making Thunderbolt/USB 3.0 t… Read the complete show notes and resources on mikemurphy.ai. Support the show Subscribe To Weekly Newsletter: AI Unplugged Connect With Me 🌐 Website 📧 Newsletter 🎥 YouTube 🐦 X 💼 LinkedIn Comments, Questions & Feedback: [email protected]