Best Hardware for System Backups

Fishmill said:

"Brand people have better luck with" lands you smack dab in the middle of anecdote-land.

I'd guess you can find dozens of anecdotes telling you'd be foolish to buy brand X or model Y.

Backing up terabytes through USB for the first time will take a long time regardless. Later backups will take less because the later backups would only involve new or modified files. But, lower your speed expectations. Don't know what "decent' means to you.

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Minimum USB 3.0 speeds as I have one of those port on the front of my PC the others on the back.

Ghot said:

Well maybe we should start with what's available in that size range...

https://pcpartpicker.com/products/external-hard-drive/#A=20000000000000,44000000000000&sort=price&page=1

Personally, I like WD Black internal HDDs.
Although I've never used one of these... a few of these might be your best option.

Western Digital WD_BLACK D10 8 TB External Hard Drive (WDBA3P0080HBK-NESN) - PCPartPicker

Western Digital WD_BLACK D10 8 TB External Hard Drive (WDBA3P0080HBK-NESN)

pcpartpicker.com

The reviews for this drive on Amazon and Newegg, look really good.




You could also get an External HDD enclosure, and just use regular HDDs in that.

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Thanks for the site link! That'll help my search as I HATE trying to shop on Amazon. Ugh!

Flipmode said:

I am not sure why people recommend WD when it comes to backup.
They are not even backup drives. They seem to intentionally call them ... I forget now. But after 2x 1TB and 1x 2TB WD failed, I will ALWAYS go with drives that a minimum 3-5 year warranty, minimum 16-32MB cache and preferrably 5400rpm+ (as many are 1yr, 8mb, 4300 rpm etc)

But you get what you pay for. Just avoid WD. They are cheap for a reason.
Just like old Maxtor, and everyone buying their drives and their data disappearing. Or the good old 4.3GB Quantum Fireball... Let's just say they went up in fire!

Please look for LONG term reliability, and not a "cheap" drive.
And please put reminder in your calendar to replace your backup drives every 3-5 years!

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Thank you for all the Excellent information and insight into WD! Do you have a hardware preference or just look for the specifics you listed?

Flipmode said:

I am not sure why people recommend WD when it comes to backup.

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Best of a bad bunch
Devil you know is better than the devil you don't
Expendable. Backup drives are only saviour when needed. If they fail, replace and re-backup
And you'd have to have done something intrinsically evil to have both source and backup fail at the same time. If concerned, tin-foil hat mode and backup the backup (ad infinitum)
Line 1 Backup originals
Line 2 Backup backup
Line 3 Backup backup
Liner 4 Goto Line 2

Xoanon said:

and insight into WD

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I have about 15 WD Black hard drives. None have ever failed, and they are fast.
At the moment I have two large ones (internal).

I have all these and more, older ones.

WD 300GB Velociraptor
M/N: WD3000HLFS

WD 500GB Velociraptor
M/N: WD5000HHTZ

WD 1TB Caviar Black
M/N: WD1002FAEX

WD 1TB Caviar Black
M/N: WD1002FAEX

WD 1TB Caviar Black
M/N: WD1001FALS

WD 2TB Black
M/N: WD2003FZEX

WD 2TB Black
M/N: WD2003FZEX

WD 2TB Black
M/N: WD2003FZEX

WD 4TB Black
M/N: WD4005FZBX ...in use

WD 8TB Black
M/N: WD8001FZBX ...in use


I still have this, and it still works... WD 36GB 10,000rpm Raptor.
It's still installed in my System Two.

My very first desktop computer was a Gateway 2000 P5-90, tower version. It came with a WD HDD that
eventually became "sticky". With the side cover off, I would lightly tap it with a pen on power up to get
it to spin up. Gateway replaced it, but that whole episode soured me on WD drives.

I started building my my own since then and my go-to drives were Seagate. I still have a few that work,
but not being used.

Since backups can take a long time I have them automatically done after midnight for my desktop computers. Each desktop computer has its own external backup drive.

I have my laptops run backups in late evening when they are usually still powered on. Each laptop backs up using WiFi to an external drive connected to may main desktop.

I try to have an external hard drive about three times the total size of the disks backed up. That all allows me to have a least two full backups saved at a time. The backup program automatically deletes the oldest backups to make room for new backups.

I use a Minipc running Fedora Linux server with 2X 14TB Hdd's connected via an external 2 bay enclosure. Works fine for backups, file sharing and media server.

As for backups - while everybody's needs are different there's usually 3 kinds of backup which need a different strategy

1) the system OS -- just keep it as small as possible and image / clone it before adding soft / hardware or upgrading releases. If you keep the OS small and have everything else on different disks / partitions you don't need to mess about with incrementals / differentials etc and a simple clone should be sufficient.

2) critical files - work in progress etc I'd put this stuff on to a reliable cloud server -- data in these cases won't be too much and fast reliable cloud services are quite cheap --

3) User data -- most of this such as photos, old emails, old office stuff such as excel spreadsheets etc is basically "invariant" so this is generally considered "archive" type data. Just back the stuff off to any sensible type of device -- decent reliable "spinners" are very cheap now -- ensure though large fast cache and 7200 or 10,000 rpm -- old slow spinners -- unreliable and should be chucked in the bin. Once backed up store this disk offline -- every so often add new stuff as appropriate e.g photos, music, etc etc.

Note also you should depending on how much you value your data keep 2 copies AND TEST RECOVERY from time to time. I've seen loads of cases where the backup logs all report successful and then all sorts of errors occur when trying recovery.

Cheers
jimbo