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.
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