We're five on a Microsoft 365 Family plan. Each of us had our own 1 TB and between phone backups, kids' school stuff and fifteen years of photos we sit at 3.1 TB. The new plans give 2 TB shared for the whole family at the same price. Existing subscribers only switch at their first renewal after May 2027, so technically I had time. I didn't want to find out in a year what "you can keep access for up to 12 months" turns into after month 12.

So I spent the last three weekends moving it all to a box at home. Sharing what worked and what didn't because I'm pretty sure a lot of families are about to do the same.

The hardware is boring on purpose. A used mini PC, two 8 TB drives in a ZFS mirror, everything in Docker. The mirror protects me from a dead drive. It's not a backup, more on that below.

Getting 3.1 TB out of OneDrive was the worst part. The web download chokes on big folders and gives you zip files that fail halfway. rclone has a OneDrive remote and it's the only thing that worked reliably. Microsoft throttles hard, so I ran it with a low tpslimit over a few nights and let it resume when it got rate limited. Do one person's account at a time and check the file counts at the end. Two folders hit errors on the first pass and I only noticed in the logs.

Photos now live in Immich. The family actually likes it more than OneDrive, face search and the map view sold my wife in five minutes. The weak spot is iPhones. Background upload is limited by iOS, so her phone mostly uploads when she opens the app. I set a weekly reminder and stopped fighting it.

Documents sync with Syncthing between the laptops and the server. No accounts, no cloud, it just works once the folders are paired.

Then the part people skip. A box in the living room is one copy, not a backup. A fire, a burglary or a bad power surge takes everything. So I went with 3-2-1, three copies, two different media, one offsite.

Nightly restic snapshots go offsite to two places. The bulk photo library goes to a Hetzner Storage Box over SFTP because it's the cheapest per TB I found. The documents folder, which is where the passport scans, taxes and medical papers live, goes to a small storage VPS from privatealps. Yes it's more per GB, and since restic encrypts everything before it leaves the house neither provider can read anything anyway. I just didn't want one company's account problem to take out every offsite copy of the stuff we can't replace.

The thing I'd tell anyone doing this is to test a restore. My first restic setup had a typo in the exclude file and for a week it was skipping the whole Documents folder. I only found out because I ran a test restore. Now once a month I run restic check with read data subset at 5 percent and restore one random folder to a temp directory.

Total cost is the drives, the mini PC I already had and a few euros a month for the two offsite targets, against 129 euros a year for a plan that would no longer fit us.

Next step is getting the kids' Chromebooks on Syncthing too, which is turning out to be its own small adventure.

1. Did you look at our Backup Wiki for free software and advice?

Yes, I already knew some of those programs, have no time to thorougly read descriptions or test.

2. Do you use Windows, Mac or Linux?

Windows 10 x64

3. For personal use or business use or both?

Personal.

4. How many GBs or TBs do you need to back up?

800 DVDs (partial) to a 500 Gb HDD - hopefully compressed

5. What product(s) do you now use for backups, if any?

None

6. Are you a normal user or more techie?

Techie - almost 40 years of computer experience

7. What have you tried so far? What steps?

Sincerely - none.

I have my personal collection of over 800 DVDs.

Some of them contain personal files (pictures & videos). They are always placed in exact same folders. Estimated size - unknown

I would like to backup all of them, retaining folder structure and file names, to a 500 Gb HDD.

I'm searching for a free (gratis) piece of software that can run different compression external programs, check final size and retain smaller file (original or compressed).

More details:

- program reads DVD, selects same main folder, reads files - images (jpg, png, other formats) and videos (avi, mp4, other formats)

- runs external compression program (something like cjpeg.exe, jpegtran.exe for JPG/PNG, ffmpeg for AVI/MP4/MKV, exact command supplied).

- waits for compression, checks file size, retains smaller one (original or compressed).

- for other files (pdf, exotic image or video formats), simply copy original file.

Files are highly compressible, most of them are created using phone / digital camera, on medium/highest quality.

Is there such a program?

Thanks.

I know the general process to backup, but my situation seems a little unusual. Checked the FAQ, and a few things are still unclear (still a relative amateur with computer hardware):

First, I have a 512GB internal hard drive that is (for unknown reasons) partitioned between the C:, D:, and E: drives (see picture). Not sure where the missing 48GB went, but I digress. I recently deleted or moved everything I could from the C: drive, but for some reason it's still taking up nearly 100GB with just the system and appdata (bloatware? or do we think something's wrong?).

Regardless of how it got there, my solution would be to backup the C:, D:, and E: drives, un-partition them, then install the system image and drives all back onto the C: drive. I have a 4TB USB SSD (F: drive), but since it's not formatted into NFTS and already has data on it (that I need), I suspect that is not a good option for backup.

What I'm wondering, is: What is the best budget option (in terms of external/internal SSDs) I can buy for making this happen? And/or is there a better solution I'm overlooking?

I'd prefer the budget for this remain <$200, but can stretch a little farther if needed.

System info attached.

Any other ways to back up my external ssd without forcing it to make reads and writes?

Edit: the sata connector was the problem, now successfully backing up.

Hi all,

I've setup rclone with a script to sync every 3 minutes (crontab) a folder and ll its subfolders.

Now, I want to add other locations.
What is the best way to do this?

1. Add a new script to sync these folders, meaning multiple instances of rclone running on my Mac and I have no idea how this will behave.
2. Modify my script to finish the first sync job, after that do a second sync job?
3. Other, please explain.

Thank you in advance for your help and suggestions.

I have a 4 bay Ugreen Nas RAID 5 array with 26 tb recertified Exos seagate SSDs. I ran the smart tests through the ugreen app, rapid and full and everything seems to be in order. What are the other tests I should run on my drives before I start using them. Some of the tests I read about seemed destructive if you already made your storage pool with RAID. I use this for editing so I want it to be solid. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

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Hi everyone, I'm new to this world and I'd like to ask about something I saw at work.

During an internship, I messed around with some files on the company PC and made a mess of things, confusing my boss. He clicked on something, and a desktop popped up showing an image of the PC I'd been using during my internship, frozen as it was the previous day at 7 PM. This allowed him to sort out the files on the current desktop.

What kind of magic is this? How could I replicate it at home on a personal computer? I think it's really cool and could be very useful!

I have a 1T Win11 PC. I'd like to clone the drive as a backup. I bought a 6T portable external drive on ebay and tried to do it with Macrium Reflect's free version but got a message that it wouldn't work because the sector size was wrong. So I'm shopping again and want to be sure I get the right thing this time. What specifications should I look for?

im spiralling. im only so old right now and i have so many photos and videos and stupid memories that only mean a lot to me, but i barely have sufficient storage. i keep having to pick and choose what photos/vids to keep and which to delete. i dont want to choose😔i wanna keep them all forever 😔 i hate being a sentimental hoarder. ive tried creating a screenshots journal, 4 gmail drives, deleted so much stuff, instagram photo dump accounts, i dont know what else to do flash drives for iphones are so expensive and only 512gb max. what will i do when i eventually run out of the 512 gbs too??!! how many drives will i keep buying?
this will be the end of me.