Does smallest SSD drive make the most sense for backup reasons

hackmole

Senior member
Dec 17, 2000
250
3
81
If you want to use a SSD drive as your startup drive and if you want to keep a backup of this drive for safety reasons in case something happens to your drive so you won't have to spend many hours resinstalling all your apps and since SSD drives are too expensive to set them up as raid mirrors, would it then not be better to get a 64gb drive so that backing the smaller one won't take as much time and won't use up as much space on your other drives.

I'm debating whether to get a 64, 128 or 250gb ssd drive but when I look at the backup issue then the 64gb drive looks like the best bet. Does that make any sense or not?
 

mfenn

Elite Member
Jan 17, 2010
22,400
5
71
www.mfenn.com
Any reasonable backup software will only count the space actually used on the drive, not the full size of the drive. So a 64GB with 50GB used would be exactly the same as a 256GB drive with 50GB used.

Good backup software will also let you do incremental backups, which only backs up the data that has actually changed since your last backup (typically very little).

I use an older version of Acronis to back up my SSD to an HDD. It takes about 5 minutes to do an incremental, so I do one of those daily. Then I do a differential every other week and a full every month.