Backup destinations

External drives & SD cards

External drives need no setup beyond plugging them in. Tusk also remembers what's on a drive after you unplug it.

External drives are the fastest way to set up a destination. No accounts, no credentials, no upload bandwidth. Plug a drive in, point Tusk at a folder on it, and you have a working backup destination in under a minute.

Tusk supports external SSDs, HDDs, USB sticks, and SD cards that macOS mounts as volumes. Each shows up in the Drives overview with its own connection state and a record of every file it holds.

Plug in your drive

Connect your external drive to your Mac. Wait for it to mount (it should appear in Finder under Locations). The first time Tusk reads from a removable drive, macOS will prompt for removable-volume access. Grant it.

Add it as a destination

When creating or editing a project, your connected drives appear in the destination picker. Pick the drive, choose a folder on it (a subfolder, not the volume root), and confirm. Tusk starts syncing immediately.

Unplug freely

When you disconnect the drive, Tusk notes the time and pauses syncing to that destination. The file table still shows the last known status for every file on that drive. You always know what was on it when it was last connected.

Reconnect and resume

Plug the drive back in. Tusk auto-detects it within a couple of seconds and resumes any queued syncs that piled up while the drive was disconnected. No manual action required.

Drive labels matter

Tusk identifies drives by their volume name. If you have multiple drives with the same name, rename them in Finder (right-click → Rename) before adding them to Tusk to avoid confusion. Plain physical labels on the drive itself (a sharpie line on the case, a label-maker tag) match the in-app label and save you future guessing.

SD cards

SD cards mounted as removable volumes appear in the Drives overview with a distinct icon and label. Tusk classifies them separately from regular external drives so you can tell them apart at a glance.

For most people, SD cards aren't backup destinations. They're sources for offload. The Offload concept page covers that workflow.

What Tusk writes

Tusk preserves your project's folder structure exactly. The path inside the destination folder mirrors the path inside your primary folder. There's no proprietary container, no archive, no vault. The files on your drive are the original files, in the original layout, openable by any other app.

Removing a drive from a project

From Project → Settings → Backup destinations, click the destination and confirm removal. Tusk stops syncing to that destination going forward. The files Tusk already wrote there stay on the drive (Tusk does not delete backup files when you remove a destination). If you want them gone, delete the folder in Finder.

Drive labels & rename →

Why labels matter when drives are unplugged, how to rename a drive in Finder.

Disconnect & reconnect →

How Tusk handles drives going away and coming back.

The offload concept →

When the SD card is a source, not a destination.

Google Drive →