Tusk is a Mac app that automatically backs up your project folders to multiple locations and tracks where every file lives — even when your drives aren't connected.
Most creatives have some version of a backup system. They drag a folder to an external drive at the end of a project, they run a sync tool when they remember, or they just dump everything after the shoot from an SD Card to some external drives and forget about it. It works...until it doesn't.
Until the time you forget about it, until the time where the single back up drive gets
corrupted and your SD Card is already wiped. Or until you realize you didn't actually
backup the final edited version and you just lost 10 hours of hard work. Or, or,
or...there are many reasons for why you might lose important project files. All of
them seem unlikely, until they actually do happen.
However there are tools out there, that do not rely on you remembering all the steps of your manual backup for each
one of your projects.
Manual backups require you to think about them. Automatic backups do not.
Here's how to set up a system that properly works for your project folders on Mac.
TL;DR: Manually dragging folders to a drive works until you forget. Automatic backup software watches your project folders continuously and syncs every change, without the need for scheduling or remembering. Set it up once and it runs itself.
Why Project Folders Are Different
Most backup tools (e.g. Time Machine or Carbon Copy Cloner) think in terms of drives or entire machines.
They're not designed around the way creatives actually work, which is in projects. A YouTube video, a client photo shoot, a music session. Each one is a folder, and each one needs to be safely backed up.
Time Machine backs up your whole machine on a schedule, which doesn't help when your projects are 300GB each and live on external drives anyway. Carbon Copy Cloner is excellent for cloning drives, but it's more tool than you need if you just want one project folder syncing to two places in the background. ChronoSync gives you scheduled tasks, but you're still manually defining each one and keeping track of whether they ran. And all of the above lose track of your files the moment you unplug the drive. If you want to follow the 3-2-1 backup strategy, you'll also have to remember to sync everything to multiple drives yourself.
The Real Problem: You Don't Know What's Backed Up
Manual and scheduled backups have a shared blind spot: they don't give you visibility.
You finish a shoot, drag the files to a drive, and move on. Three months later you want to free up space on your Mac and delete the local copies. But did the backup actually complete? Was the drive connected when you ran the sync? Are the files on the drive, or just some of them?
Most backup tools will tell you when the last sync ran. They won't tell you whether every file in your project is actually safe to delete.
Moreover you won't be able to know to which drive you backed up your files.
Looking to see on which drive the client shoot from two years ago sits?
Enjoy plugging in your old drives one by one.
Automatic Updates, Without the Trigger
Most backup tools treat each backup as a one-off event. You run it once and it's done.
But creative projects don't work that way. They keep growing over days, weeks, or even months. And I'm not just talking about footage here. Also project files, meaning editing progress, should be safely backed up when it's created.
If a project grows, many current backup solutions lack the project way of thinking.
Think about shooting a documentary over the span of five days. Each day you come
home with new footage. With a traditional tool, you're manually selecting backup
destinations each time, re-running the sync, making sure everything completed. The
tool has no concept of "this is the same project as yesterday." A project-aware backup
tool solves this differently. You set up the project once: folder, destinations,
done. From that point, any new files added to the folder get picked up and backed
up automatically, no trigger needed. Even if your backup drives aren't connected
yet, the tool queues the jobs and runs them the moment the drives come back.
One setup. Every day of the shoot covered.
How to Set Up Automatic Project Folder Backup on Mac
The goal is a system that watches your project folders and backs up every change automatically. It should verify that each transfer actually worked, and tell you what's safe to delete.
Step 1: Pick your backup destinations
For each project, decide where it needs to live. Typically that's at least two external drives and ideally one cloud destination. The minimum is two total copies beyond your working files. If your footage is irreplaceable, for sure add another physical location like the cloud or even moving one of the drives to a friends house.
Step 2: Watch the folder, not just the drive
Your backup tool needs to watch the project folder itself, not just run on a schedule. That means when you autosave your Premiere project at 2am, the updated file gets backed up automatically. When you add new assets to the folder, they get picked up without you doing anything.
Step 3: Verify transfers, don't just copy
A file can copy successfully and still be corrupted. Bit rot, interrupted transfers or format differences between drives. Any of these can produce a backup that looks fine but isn't. The tool you use should compute a checksum (BLAKE3 or MD5) during every transfer and confirm the destination copy matches the source. If it doesn't, you want to know now, not when you're trying to restore.
Step 4: Track status when drives are unplugged
When your backup drives are sitting in a bag or at a friend's place, your backup tool should still be able to tell you whether each project is covered. If you can only check backup status when the drives are connected, you're back to guessing where each file exactly lives.
What This Looks Like in Practice
With Tusk, the workflow is: create a project, point it at your folder, add your backup destinations. From that point, Tusk watches the folder in the background. New files, modified files, autosaved project files, all of it gets picked up and pushed to your backup locations automatically, with BLAKE3 verification on every transfer.
The part I find most useful: you can see the backup status of every file in the project even when your drives aren't plugged in. So when you want to clear local storage, Tusk will tell you exactly which files are safely backed up and which aren't, and it'll block you from deleting anything that isn't safe to remove yet.
When you need files back, one click restores from whichever backup is fastest, whether that's a connected drive or the cloud.
If that's the system you're looking for, Tusk has a 14-day free trial.
FAQ
No — Time Machine only backs up your Mac's internal drive. Files stored on external drives are excluded by default. For project folders on external drives, you need a dedicated sync tool that watches specific folders rather than the whole machine.
Scheduled backup runs at a fixed time — every night at midnight, for example. Automatic backup watches your folders and syncs changes as they happen. For active projects where files change throughout the day, automatic is better. You're never more than a few seconds out of sync instead of potentially hours.
Most tools don't tell you — they just confirm the sync ran. For per-file confirmation, you need a tool that tracks each file individually and verifies it exists on each backup destination. Tusk shows you the backup status of every file in a project, and physically checks that the file is present on connected drives rather than just trusting its own records.