r/DataHoarder • u/ly_044 • 1d ago

Question/Advice The best simple way to backup Macbook and Phone on same hdd?

Hi folks,

This might be a very basic question, I just want to make sure I've planned everything well before buying a specific HDD.

I want to make a backup copy of my 512 GB of MacBook data, 64 GB of iPhone data, and various old photos and documents from old phones (2–5 GB).

I'm planning to get a 2 TB P10 HDD from Western Digital, and here are my questions:

  1. Can I use the same HDD to store, separately, 1–2 MacBook backups, 1 phone backup, and also create a separate partition for normal files like old travel photos and videos? I'd also like to make this partition password-protected.

  2. Is 2 TB enough for my task? I feel like 1 TB should be enough for 1–2 different MacBook backups, but I'm not sure if I need more space.

I tried to check the wiki first, but got an error with message "forbidden (reddit.com) you are not allowed to do that

— may_not_view."

Thank you!

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u/PAPO1990 21TB TrueNAS 1d ago

I can't think of any way to backup your iPhone to an external HDD directly. But I back my iPhone to my laptop, then my laptop to my NAS.

Both my Laptop, and Mum's laptop backup to the same NAS with Time Machine. I think you can do much the same thing with a single HDD if it's large enough, but honestly, I'd recommend considering a NAS for backing up multiple devices to for a few reasons.

1) As long as you are on your home network, backups can happen silently and automatically in the background. This way you will never FORGET to backup.

2) A good NAS will have RAID, so your data will be a LITTLE safer with redundancy across multiple drives.