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 anything macOS can mount as a volume: external SSDs, HDDs, USB sticks, NAS shares mounted via SMB or AFP, and SD cards mounted as removable volumes. Each is treated as a drive in the Tusk drives overview, with its own connection state and a record of every file it holds.
1
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.
2
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.
3
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.
4
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
SD cards
SD cards mounted as removable volumes show up in the destination picker like any other drive. Tusk classifies SD cards separately from regular external drives in the Drives overview (different icon, different label) so you can tell them apart at a glance.
For most users, SD cards aren't backup destinations. They're sources for offload. The Offload concept page covers that workflow.
NAS shares
A NAS share mounted as a network volume in Finder appears in Tusk just like a local drive. Connect to the share via Finder → Go → Connect to Server (⌘K) using smb:// or afp://. Once mounted, pick a folder on it as a destination.
Network drives are slower than direct-attached storage. Expect syncs to run at the pace of your local network. They also disconnect more often (sleep, network changes), so Tusk uses its standard reconnect-and-resume logic to keep things moving without your intervention.
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.
Related
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