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.
Terabytes of footage and limited storage on your MacBook used to be a problem. If you shoot video or photos regularly, you know the feeling: your internal drive is always almost full, deleting anything feels risky, and you end up buying another external drive to kick the problem down the road.
The instinct is to treat this as a storage problem. Get a bigger Mac. Add more drives. Pay for more cloud. But adding capacity doesn't fix the underlying issue. The issue is using your Mac as a storage device when it should be a workspace.
TL;DR: Files should live on your external drives or in the cloud, not on your Mac permanently. You pull in what you're actively working on and remove it when you're done. The backup stays untouched.
Why Your Mac Is Always Full
Here's what the typical workflow looks like. You come back from a shoot with 100GB of footage. You copy it to your Mac to edit. Then the next job comes in, and the next. The footage stacks up because deleting it feels too risky: what if the backup isn't complete? What if a client wants a revision in three months?
So everything sits there. Projects you wrapped six months ago. Footage from shoots you've already delivered. All of it occupying space you need for the current job.
The instinct is to free up space by buying another drive and offloading old projects to it manually. Which works, until you can't remember which drive has what. Then you're plugging in three different drives trying to find footage from January.
Neither of those problems is actually about storage capacity. They're about not having a system that tells you what's safely backed up and where it is.
Your Mac Is a Workspace, Not a Warehouse
The shift that fixes this: your files live on external drives or in the cloud, and your Mac is just where you edit them.
When you need to work on something, you restore it locally. When you're done, you delete it from your Mac with one click. The backup stays untouched. Your Mac stays lean.
Think about a 400GB project with three days of footage from a recent shoot. You're only working on day one right now. There's no reason days two and three need to sit on your internal drive. You restore the day one folder, edit, and when you're done with it, you remove those files locally and pull in day two.
Your Mac never holds more than what you're actively editing. And you never lose track of where anything is.
This is basically how selective sync tools like Dropbox handle documents: files live in the cloud, and you cache them locally when you need them. The problem is Dropbox isn't built for footage. Syncing 400GB of raw video through it is slow, expensive, and doesn't fit the way photographers and video editors actually work. You need the same concept but built for local drives and fast transfers.
Why Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner Won't Help Here
Most Mac backup tools don't solve this problem. They solve a different one.
Time Machine backs up your internal drive on a schedule. It doesn't cover external drives at all, and it gives you no visibility into whether a specific file is safely covered before you delete it.
Carbon Copy Cloner is good at scheduled folder sync but thinks in tasks, not projects. You configure a source and destination, it runs on a timer. There's no per-file status, and no way to ask "is this folder safely backed up on two drives so I can clear it locally?"
Arq Backup is built around cloud archiving. It's a good tool for that, but cloud isn't the primary backup layer for most photographers and video editors. When you're offloading 100GB of footage after a shoot, uploading to cloud is a completely different situation from copying to a drive that's already plugged in.
FreeFileSync will sync folders, but it has the same blind spot as everything else: once your drives are unplugged, it can't tell you what's on them.
None of these tools answer the question that actually matters when you want to free up space: is this file backed up in enough places that I can safely delete the local copy right now?
How to Actually Free Up Space on Mac Without Losing Footage
Tusk was built around this workflow.
You create a project, point it at your footage folder, and add your backup destinations (external drives, cloud storage like Backblaze B2 or S3, or both). From that point, Tusk watches the folder continuously and backs up every change automatically with BLAKE3 checksum verification on every file. New footage added mid-project gets picked up without you doing anything. Autosaved edits, re-exports, project files. All of it.
The part that makes the workspace model actually work: Tusk tracks the backup status of every file across all your drives, even when those drives aren't plugged in. So when you want to clear local storage, Tusk tells you exactly which files are fully backed up across all destinations and which aren't. Files that are safe to delete, you remove with one click. Files that haven't made it to both destinations yet stay put.
When a client asks for footage from a shoot you wrapped four months ago, Tusk tells you which drive it's on without you having to plug anything in and guess. Connect the drive, restore what you need, done.
For the ingest side, Tusk handles SD card offloads directly. You plug in a card after a shoot and Tusk streams from the card to all your destinations simultaneously -- no intermediate copy needed. Same checksum verification that tools like OffShoot (formerly Hedge) and Shotput Pro use for professional ingest, bundled into the same tool that handles everything after the card comes out.
What This Looks Like Day to Day
You get back from a shoot. Plug in the cards, run the ingest. Tusk copies to your backup drives and verifies every file. Once it's done, the cards are safe to reformat.
You edit from the local copy while it's being backed up. When you're done with a section of footage, Tusk shows you it's confirmed safe on both destinations. You remove it from your Mac. You pull in the next batch.
When you deliver the project and archive it, you remove the whole thing locally. The backup drives have everything. Months later, if you need to revisit it, you restore from whichever drive is closest.
Your Mac stays at whatever working size you need for the current job. Not for every job you've ever shot.
Stop Holding Onto Footage You've Already Backed Up
Most people keep local copies of footage way longer than they need to for one reason: they're not sure the backup is actually complete. Not sure if the drive was plugged in when the sync ran. Not sure if every file made it across. Not sure which of the four drives sitting in the studio actually has the January shoot on it.
When you can't answer those questions, you don't delete anything. You just buy more storage and move on.
A tool that tracks backup status at the file level answers them. Before you remove anything from your Mac, you can see exactly which files are confirmed on which drives. Files that aren't fully covered stay put. Files that are, come off your Mac in one click.
Your MacBook is meant to run the job you're working on right now, not hold everything you've shot for the past two years just in case. Once you've got a system that tells you what's safe to clear, keeping it lean is the easy part.
FAQ
The key is having a confirmed backup before you delete local copies. A tool that tracks backup status per file will tell you exactly which footage is safely stored on your external drives or in the cloud before you remove it from your Mac. Once a file is verified across your backup destinations, you can delete the local copy without losing the footage — it's still on your drives.
Not really. Time Machine only backs up your Mac's internal drive, and it doesn't cover footage stored on external drives. It also doesn't give you per-file backup status, so you can't use it to confirm which files are safe to delete. For footage management, you need a tool that watches specific project folders and tracks backup status at the file level.
It depends on your workflow. Carbon Copy Cloner works for scheduled folder sync. Arq Backup is solid for cloud archiving. For the full creative workflow — SD card ingest, automatic project backup, file tracking across drives, and knowing what's safe to delete — Tusk is built specifically for photographers and video editors. It combines the ingest side (like Hedge or Shotput Pro) with ongoing project backup in one tool.
Most backup tools won't give you a direct answer at the file level. They log when a sync ran, not whether each individual file made it across intact. A tool that uses checksum verification and tracks per-file status will tell you whether a specific file is confirmed on each of your backup destinations before you delete the local copy.
Cloud can work as one layer of a backup strategy, but it's usually not practical as the primary way to free up local space for large footage files. Uploading hundreds of gigabytes takes time and ongoing cloud storage costs add up. Most photographers and videographers use local drives as the primary backup and cloud as a secondary layer. Tools like Tusk support both at the same time, so you can back up to drives and to S3-compatible cloud storage simultaneously.