Hard Drive Strategy

I'd like to explain my HDD strategy because you might like to rethink yours.

In both my Macs I have very small capacity drives. One is a 250GB drive. The other is a 512GB drive in a MacBook Pro.

These internal drives contain the minimum number of files. They have the System software, Applications, utilities and working files that I use every day. All other files are kept on external drives. There's a reason for this: By minimising usage of the internal drive, I maximise its lifetime.

To further extend the life of the internal drive, I have external "Documents" and "Download" folders. This strategy minimises the number of write cycles to the internal drive. (It would be nice, also, to externalise my current email files but that doesn't seem to be practical with Mail v2.1.3.)

My Music folder (with iTunes folder) is on a plug-in 128GB SD card. (This works fine because I don't keep videos in iTunes and the music files don't take up a lot of space.)

My videos, movies & TV programmes are on an external 2TB "VIDEO" drive with an additional 3TB drive as backup.

My Photos, eBooks, downloads and work files are stored on an external 2TB "DATA" drive with an additional 2TB drive as backup.

All the above files (apart from the most recent) are also archived on further drives kept in a separate building. The internal drive is also backed up to another external drive using CCC. All other backups are done via Chronosync software.

I don't use "cloud" services except for transferring files to others. That's just a personal choice to minimise the risk of data theft and also because my max download speed here is only 3Mbps.

I hope this all makes sense! I'm not telling anyone "do as I do". I'm simply explaining my reasoning because it might help you to determine a strategy that works better for you. Changing an internal drive is a real PITB and is best delayed for as many years as possible.

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