Choosing your destinations

Tusk lets you add up to five destinations per project. Most people end up with two or three. The right number depends on how irreplaceable your files are and how much time you want to spend managing the system.

The classic backup advice is the 3-2-1 rule: three copies of your data, on two different types of storage, with one off-site. The original copy on your Mac counts as one. So in practice you need at least two destinations: one local and one off-site.

The minimum: two destinations (local + cloud)

One external drive plus one cloud destination is the floor for a project that matters. The drive gives you fast restores and fast initial sync (important for large footage). The cloud gives you survival of physical disasters at the location of the drive: theft, fire, water, dropping a coffee.

For most freelance creative work, this is enough. The drive is your daily working backup; the cloud is your insurance policy.

Three destinations for true redundancy

Two external drives plus one cloud is the next level up. The second drive lets you keep one off-site (at a friend's place, in a safe deposit box, in your car if it's never parked at home) and one near you for fast access. Cloud becomes the third copy.

This is the right setup for irreplaceable archive material: wedding deliverables, master files of work you sell or license, footage from a one-shot trip you'll never repeat.

Four or five destinations

Beyond three, you're adding redundancy at diminishing returns. The reasons we've seen:

• Multi-cloud insurance. A second cloud provider in a different region or jurisdiction protects against the unlikely event that your primary cloud loses or corrupts your bucket.
• Workflow drives. A fast NVMe drive for active editing, a larger HDD for long-term local archive, and two cloud destinations on top of that.
• Client deliverables. One destination is a shared client folder (Google Drive account they have access to), so the client always sees the latest exports.

Local vs. cloud: pick by failure mode

Each storage type fails differently. A good system has at least one of each.

• Local drives fail by physical damage (drop, water, surge), theft, or running out of physical life on the hardware. Fast to write to, fast to restore from.
• Cloud destinations fail by account loss (you lose access to the email or the provider terminates your account) and by network outages. Slow to upload to for large files, but they survive almost any physical disaster at your home or studio.
• NAS sharesbehave like local drives but with network reliability problems on top. Don't rely on a NAS as your only backup; pair it with cloud.

A 3-2-1 setup with at least one local drive and at least one cloud destination protects you against the failure modes of either type. Two clouds and no local works for someone with fast internet and small projects, but for raw video, downloading 500 GB on a re-edit is rough.

Picking a cloud provider

Quick rule of thumb based on the cost shape of each provider:

• Backblaze B2 is the cheapest option for cold archive. Storage is the dominant cost, retrieval is rare. Good for footage that you'll likely never download again.
• Cloudflare R2 wins when you'll be downloading often. Zero egress fees mean you don't pay extra to restore an entire project. Good for active work that gets archived but occasionally pulled back.
• AWS S3 is the safe-default choice and has the longest track record. More expensive than B2 or R2 for backup workloads but the ecosystem around it is unmatched.
• Google Drive wins on simplicity. No IAM, no policies. Just a Google account. Best for projects where you'll share the backup folder with a client or collaborator.

One project, multiple cloud accounts

Tusk supports multiple Google Drive accounts in the same project (e.g. your personal Drive and the client's Drive) and multiple S3 destinations across providers (B2 for cold archive, R2 for fast restore). Mix and match by adding more destinations to the project; Tusk syncs to all of them in parallel.