Why YSK: If you have digital data that is important, (family photos, crypto keys/wallets…). Back it up and prevent permanently losing it.
3 different places its saved to, (iPhone, ICloud, laptop, Facebook, Google, Camera SD, Flash drive…).
2 different media, I would consider iPhone and iCloud the same. Buying two External Drives of the same type and brand too. Why? Consider losing your Apple account or the drive model fails in a year.
1 off site copy. If all your copies are in your house, a flood, fire, tornado, hurricane, EMP… would lose every thing.
0 time to waste. (My own personal add). Do it now. Procrastination is dangerous and is the biggest regret for when things go sideways.
I’m still distrustful of cloud storage - call me a fossil - so I do my own. I have a NAS drive that’s in raid 0 mode, so the two physical drives are always shadowed: if one fails, I get an alarm, can unplug and replace it with zero down time. All the devices in the house have access to the NAS, so we use it instead of the local drives for anything important. Then I have an external USB drive that I keep in a drawer at work, and I bring it home every month or so and copy the NAS to it.
Probably not a perfect solution, but seems to work.
It took me a while to accept cloud storage but I use it now. I backed up all of our family photos on Google photos.
Hmm, wouldn’t that be RAID 1? I thought RAID 0 was striping, where if a drive fails you are screwed.
It’s probably super unlikely, but I’d still be paranoid about that one day where your external drive is home and something happens (fire, flood, etc).
I did something similar until I went full remote. I just had two externals and would update one before going to work and take the out of date one back home.
Totally understand being distrustful of cloud storage. But there are a lot of great solutions that are end to end encrypted. I’ve had good luck with https://rclone.org in the past. They support so many cloud services, it’s insane. You can set your own encryption key.
Two drives is a good thing. Always have a copy at a remote location and swap it out rather than shuttling the one drive back and forth.
rclone is a good solution. I use it myself. I also just found out about syncthing which is great for syncing with your phone to something to the local network.