A couple years ago I gave a sibling a couple of external drives and said "now you can back up all your creative work! it's not off-site backups, but it's a lot safer than just relying on your laptop not getting stolen and your hard drive not failing."
I recently found out that she didn't ever get backups set up; the external drives have simply gathered dust. Luckily she hasn't had any data loss so far, but she keeps saying she should do something about it, and I want to give her something backup related for Christmas. Fellow gerbils, could you give me some advice?
Complicating the picture is her recent spur of the moment decision to spring for a Macbook which I thought would have been well out of her price range, born of frustration with a forced W10 upgrade messing up her old (core2duo ddr2) laptop. (She really should have left that machine on W7.) Subsequent updates fixed those incompatibilities, and she'll still do some things on the windows laptop, but I'm guessing she'll try to do most of her work on the new shiny.
She does still need to copy all her previous work off the old laptop, and may need some further backup strategy for it if she keeps it around. Right now Newegg has Acronis at half off ($25). There were prominent complaints about Acronis some years ago, but maybe some people seem to think it's improved? I probably would have gone with Macrium, but they've increased their pricing and even with the 20% TR discount the home version is $56, which seems a bit much if she's not really using that laptop. I hear some fans of AOMEI or EaseUS. If she doesn't care that much if the laptop fries but does need to keep her files backed up, then maybe on the PC side I should just consider a free file-based backup tool like Duplicati. Whatever it is, I need to be able to make it simple enough she will actually do it.
I know nothing about Mac backup (or really anything about recent Macs) whatsoever and I am not excited about trying to research that. If anybody has tips on that front I'd appreciate it.