My valuable data is less than 100 MiB. I just tar+compress+encrypt a few select directories/files twice a week and keep a couple of months of rotation. No incremental hassle necessary. I store copies at home and I store copies outside of home. It's a no-frills setup that costs nothing, is just a few lines of *sh script, takes care of itself, and never really needed any maintenance.
If you die suddenly tomorrow, what would you want your family to recover? What would you want your grandchildren to have access to in a few decades? That's your valuable data. They may not need or want to inherit from hundreds of thousands of files. Chances are that a few key photos, videos, and text would be enough.
This comment made me rethink what I have that is actually valuable data. My photos alone even if culled down to just my favorites would probably be at least a few gigs. Contacts from my phone would be small. Other than that I guess I wouldn't be devastated if I lost anything else. Probably should put my recovery keys somewhere safer but honestly the accounts most important to me don't have recovery keys.
Curious what you consider valuable data?
Edit: I should say for pictues I have around 2Tb right now (downside of being a hobby photographer)
With valuable I should've elaborated that it's my set of constantly changing daily-use data. Keychain, documents and notes, e-mail, bookmarks, active software projects, those kinds of things.
I have a large amount of memories and "mathom" as well, in double copies, but I connect and add to this data so rarely that it absolutely does not have to be part of any ongoing backup plan.
With photos, it is kinda different story. If I lost 50% of my last vacation photos, I would probably not even notice when scrolling through them. It makes me very nostalgic for analog cameras, where my parents would have to think strategically, how to use 30 or so slots on the analog film for 7 day trip.
