every time I have to grab the hard disk to browse my family photos and videos That is not a backup, that's an external storage. A backup should only be accesse

every time I have to grab the hard disk to browse my family photos and videos That is not a backup, that's an external storage. A backup should only be accessed to sync data (preferably with versioning, so the old data is not overwritten) and to recover lost data. My computers are synchronized with a home server that has mirrored disks, then the home server is backed up to cloud and to my parent's desktop (off-site backup). The backed up data has ~2TB (mainly photos, private git repository, documents). I use CrashPlan for the cloud and off-site synchronization. With a free account you can backup data to another computer (yours or a friend's). With a paid account you can backup to their cloud storage and you can get more things to tweak. You can provide your own encryption keys, so the data should be safer (as long as you don't loose the private key). The best thing is that it offers file versioning (even with a free account, but you don't get some of the advanced settings for that), so if something really bad happens - like a ransomware virus, that encrypts your files - you can still recover the older version. The only issue is that the application needs Internet access even when using it locally - so if something happens to your account, or you don't have Internet access, you cannot easily[1] access your data. [1] http://crashplan.probackup.nl/remote-backup/support/q/how-to-restore-from-local-crashplan-backups-without-internet.html http://crashplan.probackup.nl/remote-backup/support/q/how-to...