I've been on a recent push to back up all of my essential data locally. This has been a bit of a harder challenge than I expected, but very rewarding # Why do this Over the years, I've grown to appreciate just how important my digital files have become for me. The thought of losing my documents folder scares me from a professional point of view, but it's really the thought of losing my photos that terrifies me the most. They are my best tool for remembering memories. I trust Apple, Google, and Microsoft to store my data securely, but at the end of the day they are sync and storage tools rather than backups. Each of these providers have safeguards in place to restore data in the event it is deleted, but most of these are limited and there is the possibility of accidentally losing all my data. A local backup gives me extra peace of mind that my digital life will be safe. Having a local copy of your data can also be a nicer experience. Mobile and internet connections are getting better, but there can still be a significant delay when opening older photos and videos. Having a local, super-fast copy of all of your data means that all of your photos and videos open immediately in their original quality. # Storing the data I chose a 4TB SSD to store my data. SSDs have gotten incredibly cheap over the years, and it amazes me that I can fit my entire digital life onto something the size of a stick of gum. I paired the SSD with a Thunderbolt 4 enclosure that can upload data at up to 2GB/s. The first time I tried copying a 100gb folder and it finished before I could really process it, I let out a gasp. Technology can be amazing sometimes! # Getting the data off the cloud In many cases it is possible to download directly from the cloud onto an external SSD, but this can take a bit of fiddling and has resulted in several failed downloads in my case. My first step was to free up a decent chunk of space on my local machine - around 100gb in my case. This may be impossible for some people - I just deleted a few apps that I knew I could reinstall later - but I found that downloading to my machine first and transferring to an SSD later made the process more robust. ## Google Photos Google has an amazing tool called Takeout that makes it pretty easy to get data off onto your local machine. You simply tell it what you want to download, wait a while (in my case, a couple days), and it will let you know when the data is ready to be downloaded. You can even configure it to upload the data to Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, or another platform of your choice ## Apple Photos Apple makes it super easy to download photos if you have a mac, but it can be a bit of a challenge due to the sheer size of the data you may be dealing with. I had over 500gb of photos and videos to download, so I went year-by-year. Every evening I would select all the photos from the start of the year to the end, drag them into a local folder, and go to sleep. I ran into a few issues exporting data on some of the larger dumps, but whenever I ran into issues I would simply narrow the scope of my export. I found that exporting 50gb at a time was a nice sweet spot that would allow me to download a lot of data without running into issues. # Keeping your backups up to date There are plenty of tools that make it easy to do sequential backups, but given that I treat my backups more as a failsafe for my cloud-based drive I chose to ignore these. My solution is much simpler; I group most of my data (especially photos and videos) by year, so it's really easy for me to just drop new files chronologically into the current year's folder. I only do this once or twice a year so I don't have any other tools to automate this process. # Backing up the Backups Having a local copy of your cloud files protects you a lot more than most, but it's still a good idea to have extra redundancy if possible. I've run into my fair share of errors and failures with SSDs over the years, so having a second copy of everything is a good idea. The good news is that this is way easier to do than the initial export. I have a couple of older HDDs and SSDs lying around, so I just plugged them into my computer alongside my primary SSD and copied the folders from one device to another overnight.