Ask HN: How do you back up your data?

I have hundreds GBs of photos/videos, thousands of songs, many important docs, Mac's time-machine backups, software installers... I just find it is really difficult for me to figure out an easy and reliable way to backup them.

I currently put the photos, videos, docs and software on two portable hard disks, some photos and docs on both Dropbox and Google Drive. But such way is really inconvenient, every time I have to grab the hard disk to browse my family photos and videos. I also don't feel the cloud storage reliable, so looks like hard disks at hand better. However, those hard disks may get older and 'wear out', so I have to upgrade the disks every three or four years..

Just wondering is there a better way to do the backup?

I've become a big fan of Arq, although your collection may be a bit large. Crash Plan and Backblaze do well too.

If price is an issue, and you don't care about security, I would also consider a private Flickr account for photos and iTunes Match for music, and then use Dropbox/Arq for the documents/other valuables. Photos/music are fairly safe offsite with those, then your docs will be in S3/Glacier with Arq. Not perfect, but an alright solution for cheap.

My method is pretty close to yours:

1. Google Drive (got 2 years of 100GB space with Chromebook), was previously using Dropbox

This provides me a backup locally on the computer and one off site.

2. I have an external hard drive connected to the workstation that runs an update weekly to give me a third copy of all my data. I switch out the drive with a second external drive on a weekly basis.

If my computer dies, I have Google Drive and then the external hard drive x2. If the external hard drive fails then no big deal. If Google drive wipes out everything still no big deal.

I backup around 70GB.

*edit: The OSes I use are Windows 8.1, ChromeOS, and OSX,

BackBlaze has worked well for me:

http://www.backblaze.com/

easy to restore, and works silently in the background.