Tips for managing a low-storage laptop?
I bought an M2 Macbook Air at the start of this year for uni. I only planned to use it for uni work as I have another 'more powerful' laptop that I use for everything else, but I kinda love the M2 and want to make it my daily driver laptop. Battery lasts for ages, screen is great, it's thin and light, etc. The problem is - as you might guess - I only got the 512GB model and if there's one thing Apple hates, it's people having control over their hardware, so no expandable storage. I can't afford to upgrade the entire laptop, so I need to work with what I have. Here's what I want to use it for:
- Graphic design: Adobe software, high-res images, typefaces, etc.
- Music production: Ableton Live 11 Suite, sample packs, plug-ins, project folders, etc.
- Music library: uncompressed .m4a files because iTunes hates Vorbis đ˘, ~80% of my library (I don't have everything downloaded yet) is 25GB.
- Web-browsing: Firefox... this one isn't really relevant but I feel like I should include it for completeness.
Does anyone have any tips to stretch this 512GB as faaaaaar as it can go? I have a 2TB external SSD, but I'm wary of keeping anything important on it because it's small and I don't want to accidentally lose a bunch of stuff. I can spend a bit of money (maybe 30usd) if anyone has a good idea that requires buying something, but I can't spend any ludicrous amounts, I already did that to get the laptop!
If thereâs data youâre worried about losing, by far the most important thing you can do is keep backups: hardware fails, drinks get spilled, things get stolen, malware hits at the worst possible time, so Iâd say right now the data on the laptop is 95% as much at risk as it would be on the SSD.
Spend the $30 on a yearâs worth of cloud storage, set up automated daily backups (make sure itâs set to back up USB storage too), and then use the 2TB drive with peace of mind!
This is advice that is floating around in my head that I am - very unwisely - not actioning. My current 3,2,1 setup is more like 1... spread around a bunch of different equally susceptible devices. For cloud storage, I'm worried about privacy, do you have any recommendations on A: privacy conscious cloud storage, or B: automated encryption services for non-private cloud storage? This is technically off-topic, but it would allow me to delete things I don't really care about from the computer and just keep it on the backup where if goes it goes.
If you can stretch to $9/month I'd strongly recommend Backblaze - storage is all they do, so they're damn good at it, and their end user application supports client-side encryption. There are some minor caveats about how they handle decryption if a full restore is needed, but not anything I'd say is concerning for the average person. For what it's worth I use them for my personal backups and for a significant amount of work data, although both via their B2 (API-based storage only) product rather than the consumer application.
Alternatively, if you're comfortable using a CLI then restic will do locally encrypted backups to pretty much anywhere, and you can just pick your cloud provider and storage tier based on who's the cheapest per TB (just look out for hidden retrieval and egress fees, that's where some providers get you!).
Last thing I'd say is stick with treating backup as backup if you can - I wouldn't recommend deleting local copies even once you've got a cloud copy if at all possible. If you don't want to carry the external SSD for any reason, use that as your dumping ground for things you clear off the internal drive and then have the external and internal both sync to the cloud, rather than deleting from the internal and relying on cloud alone. Makes life a lot easier to have a consistent local copy of everything and an exact remote mirror of that, in my experience!
Backblaze would bring my monthly service payments (which is currently only obsidian sync lol) to $20 (about 13 USD), which sounds like a pretty good investment for peace of mind/data. How would you rate the UX on a scale of 1-10? I would be looking for something that's as close to set-and-forget as possible because I know that if it wasn't, I would still do the "forget" part.
Strong caveat that my own data goes via a NAS directly to their API, so my experience with their consumer UI/UX only stretches as far as setting it up for a couple of friends. That said, you can also read that as "it's the thing I set up for people's systems that I won't be around to manage day-to-day", so on that basis alone I'm giving it a solid 9/10 on the set and forget front. You pretty much just install it, set a passphrase, select the drives to mirror and any file type filters, and it just keeps doing its thing from there on out.
The main thing to remember if you're using the application is that it actively enforces that "backup is backup" philosophy I mentioned: if you delete a file locally it'll be cleared from their systems after 30 days, and the same goes for external drives if you don't connect them at least once every 30 days. It's designed as a mirror of your local data in case something happens to it, rather than a Google Drive-style service to offload stuff - although if you want to look at it with a positive spin they're forcing you to follow good practice by always having a local and remote copy rather than relying on only the remote.
In reality it's probably actually set up that way because they support unlimited drives and unlimited data on the consumer plan, so there needs to be some self-limiting factor there, and making it proportional to the maximum storage of the computers and USB drives you physically own seems a reasonable compromise. Also means every time you buy a new USB drive it inherently expands your backup storage to match, which I consider a nice bonus!
If you use the B2 API directly then it's just storage - you pay per TB and you have complete control, things only get added or deleted when you choose, but UX is a matter of finding and setting up your own software. Probably not what you're looking for, by the sound of things.
this seems like the best indication of ease of use, thank you! Backblaze + a permanent USB seems like the way to go for safely expanding storage.
EDIT: it seems like low-profile type C drives aren't really a thing, because there's not enough space in the connector like there would be on a type A... will just use the drive I have currently to offload projects later. If I remove the drive will backblaze keep it backed up, or see that it "disappeared" and delete it?
Glad to hear it!
As long as it gets a chance to sync the drive at least once every 30 days itâll stay backed up even when disconnected, so if you get into the habit of plugging it in it more regularly than that youâll be fine. The âContinuousâ backup schedule (the default, I think) should normally auto scan for changes at least once per hour.
You might need to open the app and add the drive to the backup list the very first time you connect it, but thatâs a one-off.
I use Backblaze personal application backup. The UX is fantastic. Your first backup will take a while, but after that it just sits in the status bar and does its thing. It will automatically back up all connected drives. They advertise âunlimitedâ storage capacity. Unlike some services, it pretty much is unlimited. It doesnât back up network storage, but it will happily back up everything you can connect to your computer, even if itâs hundreds of terabytes.
One thing you will want to do is upgrade the version history. By default it keeps 30 days of versions, but you can upgrade it to 1 year of versions for no extra cost.
rsync.net is one of the top-tier players. You can get even cheaper if your technically minded, but at retail costs less than $10/mo for 800GB of cloud storage with 24/7 email and phone support. While they do specialize in UNIX storage, there are drag and drop solutions for all platforms. While that costs more than many other solutions, they also don't have any hidden transfer fees. Cheaper cloud storage can sometimes throw you an unexpected bill if you need to do a mass restore. If you're seeking enterprise-grade reliability while avoiding the tech giants, they're hard to beat. 7 snapshots a day that you can customize timings for means some damn fine point in time recovery for laypeople and very good ransomware protection.
I have a lifetime 2TB I purchased from pcloud. I think I got it on a holiday sale for less than $300. They have a free 10GB tier to test out. While their lower tiers are not encrypted, I just do the encryption myself before uploading anything sensitive. They also have robust filesharing capabilities with time-limited, password-protected, and download limit options. They do have an outbound transfer limit per month, but it's high enough that a bulk recovery will be fine if you turn off your shares. I wouldn't use the shares for full public links for that reason though.
Not sure what provider gives $30 for a TB a year for encrypted though. Cheapest I was able to find was 2TB for $100/yr at sync.net, and pcloud is cheaper after like 3 or 4 years.
Hetzner storage boxes aren't far off that nowadays, they're âŹ3.20/month for 1TB (~$42/year), but the real way to do backups on the cheap is cold storage: something like AWS Glacier/Scaleway C14/GCP Archive can go as low as $1.50/TB/month for the baseline cost. The disadvantage is that they come with access fees, minimum storage periods, and retrieval delays of varying onerousness - you're trading lower cost for extra complexity and reduced flexibility, basically.
It's... not what I'd recommend to most people, if I'm honest. The $30 comment was more of a nod towards "backup is where I think your money is best spent" than a worked example, but it is possible!
Why not iCloud? Their 2TB plan is something like $11/mo in the US. You can use it for device backups as well as for regular storage; stuff in your iCloud drive is automatically added and removed from your local device so you don't need to worry about your device's storage limits as long as you have a pretty reliable internet connection. And if you don't have reliable internet, you can keep your most important things "stuck" in your device by simply clicking on "Keep downloaded" in the context menu.
You could get something like this (a super small 256 GB USB C flash drive) and just leave it plugged in.
I can't believe I didn't think of this. I'm hesitant about using up one of my 2 ports (one of the most nefarious design decisions that Apple has ever made), but it could get me up to about what I'm usually comfortable with... thanks for the idea!
Make sure to have good backups of it or only store things that are not important. While it is convenient to keep it plugged in, it also means it will bump into things, maybe get stuck at times, etc. This might damage the connection over time.
USB hubs exist. You can turn you 2 ports into 5.
A dock is probably out of your budget, but maybe search around some local 2nd hand shops and you should be able to get a decent (powered) USB hub at least.
Another idea is there are also some pretty tiny micro-sd readers that could give you a similar setup with the ability to swap different cards out for different purposes if you needed even more space. The catch is that could complicate your backup situation.
What would you say the usable lifespan is for one of those small Samsungs? More than 3-4 years? Not as a primary backup source necessarily, just wondering how long it would be until you would want to replace it, if you have any experience using them.
I haven't used one. I'd compare it with a Sumsung micro SD card. Generally the lifespan would be a function of bytes written to the drive and not time in use. My gut says that there shouldn't be any issues. But as always you'll want to have a backup solution for important data.
TLDR: Johnny Decimal on iCloud, keep as few folders downloaded as you can.
I've had the same issue, since upgraded to a 1TB model after an upgrade cycle. One thing that helped me was setting up a sort of "pseudo-home" directory in my iCloud Drive. I pay for 2TB of storage there, and it integrates more or less flawlessly with macOS, but readers are reminded that other cloud storage providers are available. You could also set this up on an external drive, but for the love of everything that is holy, please practice proper backup hygiene if you do that.
I split that directory up into 10 subdirs with 10 more directories each. For details, look up the Johnny Decimal system of file ordering, but I'll make it short here.
The top directories, 00, 10, 20, 30 and so on, are Areas (A). They have broad topics of what's in them. 00 is Resources, 10 is Graphic Design, 20 is Writing, 30 is "Raw Data" which mostly means backups, 40 is Computer Science, 50 is Volunteering, and so on. 90 is the Archive, 100 is a single folder containing everything I need to sort.
Inside those directories, there's Categories (C). They are more granular but still broad enough to contain a lot. 02 has my template files, like invoices and forms. 07 has all my typefaces. 11 has ongoing, 12 abandoned personal projects. You get the idea.
Then in those, there's the specific objects (ID). One project for instance would be 11.02, which is a project where I came up with and designed several fictional logos for practice. 40.02 contains my datasets for training my own machine learning models. 99.05 contains all my emails from ten years ago, when I was still using Gmail.
This has two benefits: First, everything is easy to find because it's categorised in the AC.ID notiation, and second, there's never a question about where a newly created file goes. Here's an example of what this looks like on my system, with one of my texture folders being open.
And let's close the circle to your problem: The entire Decimal folder is in iCloud. It stays there. At this point, it's close to 400 GB alone, and that's not counting applications and the things that can't stay online. Only some folders - like Typefaces, my Obsidian Vault, and other things I need all the time - are kept offline. Keep Downloaded is a new feature in macOS Sequoia, and it does exactly that, so I don't have to worry about sync states when I'm working on a big project. The majority however is kept online, off my drive, and I stream it down when I need to. That way, my drive is mostly empty (After a year of use, my 1TB drive isn't even half full with this approach, and most of that is screen recordings).
Hope this helps! It's a lot of work to set up, but once it is and you keep at it, you'll never have to worry about storage or finding your files again.
Complex, and I'm hesitant about having data online-only, but it's an interesting concept. Will absolutely read more about Johnny Decimal, this question is being asked as part of an all-encompassing EOY tech reset I'm doing so I'm open to drastic re-designs of the ways I interact with technology.
I have Time Machine backups too, and while itâs a lot of work it paid off for me personally. So simple once you get over the hurdle of setup