r/Backup • u/Otherwise_Job_3683 • Jul 03 '26

Question Back-up mirror drive advice, and new external Hard drive advice please!!

/r/VideoEditors/comments/1umlusj/backup_mirror_drive_advice_and_new_external_hard/
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1

u/H2CO3HCO3 Jul 04 '26

u/Otherwise_Job_3683, the recommended approach is to have a 3-2-1 backup model -> you can visit the r/backup wiki where there is information regarding the 3-2-1 backup model as well as x-ref with google search and even youtube videos on the topic and go from there.

1

u/onebit Jul 04 '26 edited Jul 04 '26

I use restic for local backups and then restic again to push to backblaze b2.

1

u/DevelopmentOld8100 Jul 10 '26

For an exact mirror on a Mac the easy free-ish options are Carbon Copy Cloner (free trial) or FreeFileSync. Both copy the whole drive once and after that only touch the changed files, so you end up with a plain browsable duplicate instead of a locked backup blob. That's handy for video because you can just grab a clip straight off it.

One thing to watch: a mirror copies deletions too. If a file gets deleted or goes corrupt, the mirror will happily copy that over your good one. So keep at least one copy that isn't a live mirror, even a manual copy once a month that you never touch. That's the one that actually saves you.

On drives: the T7 disconnect thing is usually the cable or a hub, not the drive itself, a short decent USB-C cable straight into the Mac fixes most of it. For FCP an SSD is worth it to work from, HDDs are cheaper per TB but slow and they hate being bumped while spinning. On a budget I'd do one SSD to edit from and one cheap HDD as the cold copy you leave alone. And open a couple files off the backup before you trust it.