*** You are probably on this site because you love photography and your photographs are important to you. Whatever you are storing your images on will absolutely fail someday, so you better have backups…plural.
My main onsite backup solution is to a Drobo 5N which is performed automatically every night using SyncBack Free by 2BrightSparks. ***
*** My Drobo is normally RO (read-only) but SyncBack resets it to RW (read-write) for nightly backups then immediately back to RO to protect from malware ***
I can't protect from malicious ransomware overwrites unless I choose a setting to never overwrite a primary source file. For the last 3 decades I always rename a file when creating a different version...ie XXXX_2.xxx
*** With that said, I wish SyncBack had ransomware settings of a max of fixed number of overwrite files rather than a percentage. In my case 1% is over 3000 files. I'd like 3 files***
*** Update October 2023: Recently I have been having Drobo errors and replaced the Drobo itself and some parameters. I changed the Drobo in its Network Settings from DHCP to a manually assigned IP address.
*** My Syncback Backup Software settings: ***
Expert mode
Simple Screen
Source: E:My Documents\ (folder to backup from)
Destination: \\192.168.1.xxx\Public\MyDocs_SyncBack\ (folder to backup to, where xxx is the rest of the IP address)
When Screen
Schedule: Every 1 days
Run As: **-****\***** ('computername'\'admin-user')
Decisions-File Screen
What to do if file has been changed on Source and Destination (I never change destination)
Check: Do nothing, skip file (this way if source gets encrypted it will not overwrite Drobo)
What to do if file exists on Source but not on Destination
Check: Copy file to Destination
Programs-Before Screen
Run before profile: "C:\Windows\SncBk_102123.bat"
Check: wait until the program has finished before running profile.
Check: Wait a maximum of ‘30’ seconds This (almost always) allows all programs to close properly.
Programs-After Screen
Run after profile: "C:\Windows\restart.bat"
*** below are the scripts for SyncBack: located in root of C:\Windows ***
SncB_102123.bat
; this script initiates the user ‘DroboBK’ which I have created to have read/write privileges
; ALWAYS reboot after usage. If run manually, might have to reboot and right-click 'run as administrator'.
net use \\192.168.1.xxx\Public ********* /user:DroboBK
; where xxx is the rest of the IP address and ********* = PassWord)
restart.bat
; this simple one line script shuts down then reboots the computer whereby the system now only has read access once again:
shutdown /r