Solved 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

Xoanon said:

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

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Are you sure it's USB 3.0? Not 3.2?
I would check if I were you as the throughput is far far superior.
Is the port blue? Hmm that may only indicate 3.1 which is still 3.0.

Backup your PC
-> once a month with a full backup.
-> perform a differential backup each day (if you have LOTS of changes occurring) otherwise each week.
-> perform Incremental backups every 20 min to 3 hours.

I have a back up profile setup for the OS and applications for the above (full and differential). Then I have a profile set up for my data. That way I can back it up more frequently, store more versions in the repository, plus more easily upload it to the cloud and multiple locations given it is a smaller amount of data in each backup.

Just remember, the computer may not even be "on" so many of these backups will not run. This is important - it is why I set the Full backup schedule to wake each computer (monthly) so it is not missed. The diff + incr can be missed as will be caught during the day, and you can set incremental to run if missed, for example.
MOST backups will have MINIMAL impact on you using the computer. They trigger Windows to perform a Shadow Copy of the system. This then allows all files in use to be backed up safely.
If you are using a low-spec PC then you can easily tell good backup software to throttle / restrict it's I/O performance (eg. xx MB/sec). Very easy to overcome these problems.

I have a post somewhere with a bunch of software I have recommended. See here... and for loading drivers if system requires it

Xoanon said:

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?

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I always used to sell Freecom drives to clients. Plug them in to the router and they would hum along for 5-10 years. Anything similar to this that is reliable would be viable for your needs. #1. Reliability. You don't want to waste hours and hours recovering data. What is your time worth? Spend the extra few bucks and claim it on your tax or salary sacrafice it through work.

Just a Disk / Drive with a network interface, allowing computers to backup over WiFi 6 or LAN to the drive. With differential and incremental backings taking up so little data, bandwidth was never an issue.

Plus, it allowed me to set PC's to have their own full backup annuity (so all PC's don't attempt to do a full backup on 1st or 1st Monday of month) and are scattered through the month. The other benefit was that I could run backups of VMs and run backups WITHIN VMs to one central drive.

So my recommendation? (in no order)
#A.
- USB 3.2 External Enclosure (or optionally w/ GBe port.
- __TB Drive with VERY high MTBF (and TBW rating if you desire SSD).

#B.
- __TB network drive with high MTBF (and TBW rating if you desire SSD).

These are the most important factors when shopping for ANY backup drive. The fact no one has mentioned this to you really concerns me...
I've worked in enterprise UPS and backup organisations and this is the best value I can give anyone wanting to protect their data.
Good luck mate!

1. Use HDD for Servers and Data centers, for example, WD Gold, WD Ultrastar VS, Seagate Exos.
2. Use reliable Power Supplies, such as Seasonic Gold.
3. Copy important documents to 2 separate HDDs, then disconnect the power and interface from them and remove them from the computer. Periodically (once every 6 months) connect these HDDs to your computer and check the files using the checksum.
4. Additionally, copy the most important documents to a DVD.

- Do not use an SSD to store important documents, as information may be corrupted if the SSD is powered off for a long time.
- Flash drives cannot be used to store documents.

Industrial strength HDD
Seagate IronWolf NAS harde schijven (NAS-opslag) | Seagate Nederland

I use this:


Each bay can be powered on/off individually and the bays are hot swapable. I use a script and Xcopy to copy my data to two or more drives in it.

I have a 6tb wdc black and a 6tb Seagate ironwolf pro in the bay on a permanent basis for two current copies of my data.

I also make system disk image backups from my nvme system disk to an nvme backup disk and I periodically copy them to one of these externsl hard drives.

The drives remain powered off when not in use.

oreyro said:

- Do not use an SSD to store important documents, as information may be corrupted if the SSD is powered off for a long time.
- Flash drives cannot be used to store documents.

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Ssd when powered off and in storage can retain data for much more than a year. How much more depends on how the drive was used, but two or more years seems reasonable.

Why do you say documents cannot be stored on flash?

I have a somewhat aging Netgear READYNAS with two 8.4TB drives mirrored. It has a 4.5TB USB drive hanging off it to do backups of the most critical data by itself. The USB drive is formatted NTFS so that any Windows system can access those files just by taking the drive off the NAS and connecting it to any computer.

oreyro said:

- Flash drives cannot be used to store documents.

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Excuse me? Subject to the limitations of SSD drives (which are all FLASH drives), you can certainly use them for backup. Two off-like USB enclosures for 4TB NVMe drives are my primary off-line backup. Those drives are refreshed on a monthly basis on an alternating two-week cycle. I write all the backups files at least once a month on those drives, so they're pretty certain to retain the data between power cycles.

CountMike said:

Industrial strength HDD
Seagate IronWolf NAS harde schijven (NAS-opslag) | Seagate Nederland

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Yeah, the 8TB IronWolf sits comfortably above 260 MB/s (both read and write) at just $180. There exists a reason why it's Amazon's Choice with more than 2,000 units sold by Amazon in past month. https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-IronWolf-Internal-Hard-Drive/dp/B084ZV4DXB

That said, the good thing about Amazon being the seller for this item is that Amazon doesn't very often tend to play hard ball on you when you need to go for a refund. Whether you like Jeff Bezos or not.

First and foremost, the fact that one backs up his data is what is most important. What media one backs up to is subjective to the user's preferences and finances as well as how much time he wants to devote to making his images (as well as restoring them). A lot of times those preferences include what the user has on hand at the time which would be me..

I had a tubful of old HDDs which I hated to see go to waste. I donated a lot to the local school IT department and kept only enough of the 1-2 tb ones for my needs.. For years I used them in an external dock to store my backups. I had no investment and I could easily rotate them.

As time passed folks started giving me old systems that had SSDs in them. Once again I donated all the tiny SSDs and kept the larger ones for backup. Once I started backing up to SSDs, that's when I knew I would NEVER go back to HDDs for any purpose.

Fast forward to 2025. Now all my backup drives are NVMEs in drive enclosures. A full system image takes 4 minutes. All the SSDs have been given to friends I have indoctrinated into imaging their system.

glasskuter said:

Fast forward to 2025. Now all my backup drives are NVMEs in drive enclosures. A full system image takes 4 minutes. All the SSDs have been given to friends I have indoctrinated into imaging their system.

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My two off-line USB backup drives are NVMe 4TB drives, but I still have a NAS with rotating memory that also receives backups of Windows and data. I want any longer term backups to be on multiple media types for data security.

Everyone, I appreciate the numerous responses I've gotten but I need to get this thread a bit back on track. What I'm really looking for is a USB Storage device (~10Tb or more) to offline store movies on. Yes, the movie can be re-ripped or downloaded but I'm mainly looking for responses on users specific experiences with various Manufacturers or drive types. Thanks!