Elena works in customer operations at another tech company—and she’s seen firsthand what happens when backups fail. It’s made her more cautious (her words: “paranoid, in a good way”) about how she protects her own files.
“I’ve seen customers lose everything—no backup, or worse, a corrupted one. That experience stuck with me.”
When she started looking to reduce her reliance on Big Tech, she discovered Hivenet.
After migrating her files and running a few trial setups, she built a system that backs up her core folders to Hivenet in the background—quiet, reliable, and totally hers.
Elena’s setup at a glance
Elena backs up three main folders from her Mac:
Media — photos, videos, and her music library
Personal — key documents, records, and files
Study — materials from her MSc and online courses
These folders are mirrored into her Hivenet folder using automation.
Her sync strategy
After experimenting with basic scripts and rsync, Elena wanted something easier to manage—and easier to trust. She landed on Hazel, a paid automation tool for macOS (Windows users might try FileJuggler).
Here’s how her setup works:
What | When | How |
Files under 50MB | Hourly | Synced immediately to Hivenet |
Files over 50MB | Nightly at 10PM | Synced overnight to avoid slowing down her system |
To keep things smooth during the day, she uses Snail, a small app that throttles Hivenet’s network usage so it doesn’t interfere with her workflow.
Why Hivenet?
“I’m still using Time Machine for local backups, and Backblaze for full system backup. But Hivenet replaces Dropbox for me. I like that it’s not part of a huge tech monopoly, and I love that I’m supporting something community-powered.”
While Elena currently pays for Hivenet’s 1TB yearly plan, she’s planning to build a NAS so she can start contributing storage and lower her subscription costs.
“I found a cool guide and I want to learn more about setting it up myself.”
Key takeaways:
✅ Use tools like Hazel or FileJuggler to automate syncs to Hivenet
✅ Schedule backups based on file size and system load
✅ Throttle bandwidth to avoid slowing down your daily work
✅ Hivenet plays well with other tools in a layered backup strategy
✅ Contributing storage is a great next step (and cost saver)
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⬅️ Hivenet: we’re nothing without our community
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➡️ Kiran: nurturing a digital brain