Auto copy photos from iMac to external hard drives

Joe94

Joe94

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Hello I have an iMac 21.5 (2019), which I’m planning on using for photography purposes, however I’m totally new to the macOS & want to know if there is a way I can tell the Mac to automatically copy photos from the internal hdd to 2 plugged in external hard drives, to almost act like my own personal back up. (preferably free or cheap options aha)


I don’t want to do this via time machine as I’m keeping that to a separate partition on one of the drives. Thanks
 
domart said:
buy an app called carbon copy cloner
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rob-nikon said:
+1 for carbon copy cloner. I think it was something like £30 when I bought it a while ago.
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Thank you both, I will take a look at this one. Does this one then also allow me to delete things from the mac internal drive but keeping it on the external drives?
 
Joe94 said:
Thank you both, I will take a look at this one. Does this one then also allow me to delete things from the mac internal drive but keeping it on the external drives?
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It’s backup software. It can create copies of the drives in whatever way you want it to. There is a neat ‘safetynet’ feature that moves any deleted files to another folder before deleting them after a set period of time (you can set the time).

If you want to delete the original file surely it’s not backup you want to do.
 
ChrisH said:
Can Carbon copy be scheduled to do a copy during the night or does it have to be manually triggered.
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It can be done in a variety of ways. I’ve now got it set to run an automatic backup when it sees my external drives are connected. Previously when I used the internal drive and backed up to a portable usb drive I had it set to wake up my Mac once a week in the middle of the night, run the back up, email the backup result to me and shutdown the Mac. I could still do this if I left the external drives constantly powered.

For macs it’s the perfect software for automating your backups in a way that suits you. You can of course run a manual backup anytime you would like to.
 
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rob-nikon said:
It’s backup software. It can create copies of the drives in whatever way you want it to. There is a neat ‘safetynet’ feature that moves any deleted files to another folder before deleting them after a set period of time (you can set the time).

If you want to delete the original file surely it’s not backup you want to do.
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Thanks for this Rob & the only reason a mentioned about deleting originals is because if you use back up software like iCloud, if you delete the original then it removes the backed up version where as the kind of back up I wont is essentially just a copy of my photos.
 
Joe94 said:
Thanks for this Rob & the only reason a mentioned about deleting originals is because if you use back up software like iCloud, if you delete the original then it removes the backed up version where as the kind of back up I wont is essentially just a copy of my photos.
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I will remove the deleted files. The only way to keep them would be using safetynet. It makes sense in a way in that if you delete the original you probably won’t want the backup anymore either. Safetynet works well in that it catches the accidental deletions by giving you extra time before it’s fully deleted.
 
rob-nikon said:
I will remove the deleted files. The only way to keep them would be using safetynet. It makes sense in a way in that if you delete the original you probably won’t want the backup anymore either. Safetynet works well in that it catches the accidental deletions by giving you extra time before it’s fully deleted.
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Thanks Rob for the extra advice & so following this and I apologise but this is all new to me aha. But if I got to the stage where my internal hdd was full, so I want to clear it ready for more images to processes do I start a new drive for a fresh backup & I take it the images will still be saved on the external drive they were backed up to?
 
Joe94 said:
Thanks Rob for the extra advice & so following this and I apologise but this is all new to me aha. But if I got to the stage where my internal hdd was full, so I want to clear it ready for more images to processes do I start a new drive for a fresh backup & I take it the images will still be saved on the external drive they were backed up to?
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Personnally I’d copy them across to another new drive but also have at least one backup of that data too. If there is only one copy of the data there is no backup. Even two copies can be said to not really exist. The 3-2-1 backup rule is what I try to stick to. CCC just makes light work of automating backups. You still need master copies of the data and backups of that data.

Trust me on one thing hard drives will fail. No hard drive lasts forever. My master hard drive is on the way out. The partition with the LR catalogue on it failed. That wasn’t a problem because I had backups of those files which I copied across to the new drive. No loss of data, if I didn’t have the backups I’d have lost a LR catalogue spanning 10 years!

You need to look at formatting the drives so they can be read by a Mac and windows PC. That especially important if you used to use a PC of want to read it on a PC in the future. I can’t remember what format you need.
 
Chronosync is also very good for this. I like their model of "pay once - free updates for ever".

Paid them about 10 years ago for software I updated this week :)
 
rob-nikon said:
You need to look at formatting the drives so they can be read by a Mac and windows PC. That especially important if you used to use a PC of want to read it on a PC in the future. I can’t remember what format you need.
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Less of an issue than it used to be. Macs can read NTFS fine and can be persuaded to write to them. Win10 can't use HPFS+ but you can install MacDrive and it will.

Somebody techie will explain why FAT is a terrible idea :)
 
Thank you everyone for your advice & tips. I think I may stick with using one drive with time machine & then look at the Carbon copy clone software to use with the other drive & partition to use for purely the images so that I have 3 full copies of my images which tbh is the most important thing!
 
rob-nikon said:
Personnally I’d copy them across to another new drive but also have at least one backup of that data too. If there is only one copy of the data there is no backup. Even two copies can be said to not really exist. The 3-2-1 backup rule is what I try to stick to. CCC just makes light work of automating backups. You still need master copies of the data and backups of that data.
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Sorry Rob for my silly question, but what is the difference between having a copy of my images & a backup of them? Cheers Joe
 
Joe94 said:
Sorry Rob for my silly question, but what is the difference between having a copy of my images & a backup of them? Cheers Joe
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The idea is that if anything happens to the original files you have at least one backup to restore them from. If you have no backups and lose the originals through hard drive failure, theft or fire then you lose the files forever and have no way to restore them. The idea behind the 3-2-1 backup method is to have 3 copies of the data on 2 different media types with 1 copy off site. That way you are protected by having at least one copy of the worse happened such as a fire destroying both your on site original and onsite backup. Backing up really depends on if you’re willing to lose your images. The only known point is Hard drives will fail at some point, it’s just a matter of time.
 
rob-nikon said:
The idea is that if anything happens to the original files you have at least one backup to restore them from. If you have no backups and lose the originals through hard drive failure, theft or fire then you lose the files forever and have no way to restore them. The idea behind the 3-2-1 backup method is to have 3 copies of the data on 2 different media types with 1 copy off site. That way you are protected by having at least one copy of the worse happened such as a fire destroying both your on site original and onsite backup. Backing up really depends on if you’re willing to lose your images. The only known point is Hard drives will fail at some point, it’s just a matter of time.
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Right okay, so if I was to set it up so I have a copy on the internal drive, a copy on an external drive, a copy on a cloud drive & a time machine hard drive set up.. Then this should put me in a good position? & then all i need to look at is your recommendation of software to help make this system work easily?

Thanks again for your help with this.
 
you could also look into backblaze- off site cloud backup, and it's stupidly cheap
 
If you're an Amazon Prime member, they have unlimited backup space for your photos.
 
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