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What hardware do people use to store backups on?

Jskid

Jskid

Member
I'm going to buy a new storage device for putting backups on. What should I buy? I'm considering:

  • external hard drive
  • internal hard drive
  • internal hard drive with an external case
  • usb flash memory stick
I am looking at a USB 3 interface
 
No offense but this thread doesn't make a lot of sense. If you wish to store a lot of data in a seperate location, then you need a hard drive. External drives are so cheap there is no sense in buying an internal one and putting it in a case. Not unless you want to be able to put it back into a PC without a lot of hassle. If you buy an internal drive you will still have to protect it somehow.

USB flash stick is a bit pointless. If you are talking a few MB, then use a cloud solution.
 
Depends on your needs. I go for convenience then warranty. Photos and videos that friends and family have are kept on their original media. Usually SD for cameras. Pictures off phones that they care to keep are already emailed to others or are copied onto their computers. So that just leaves how to backup their computers and devices. I just have a 1TB Seagate Freeagent portable. I couldn't resist it. It has a 5 year warranty and was $65 at Best Buy 2 years ago. It's just an oversized 2.5" laptop SATA drive inside so it doesn't need an external power supply. Regular SATA drives inside external HDD storage from WD is getting harder to find. They have slowly been changing it to USB only.

Anyhow, I pulled the drive out so that I can switch between eSATA, USB 2, USB 3 and Firewire. Those are the fastest interfaces available off the computers and I just switch adapters as needed them. If you like this idea, consider the Seagate GoFlex. Yes, it's only one backup, but that's all I need. Honestly, it is a duplicate of the data they posses. One that exists on the original media or HDDs then the backup.

Lately because killer sales off Flash drives and SSDs are in the $.50 mark. Like the OCZ Petrol 128GB for $65 and I've already seen SD cards on sale in the $.35 mark (32GB for $11). I have considered suggesting more to them to backup their pictures on the SD cards and USB drives since they find it far more useful to share and show.

So far they like it. Modern BluRay/DVD players from the past few years and gaming consoles all have USB inputs and nearly every new 'good' TVs have them too. They love the simplicity. I like the fact that they are smiling.
 
It depends. For full drive backups, a HDD. For music and videos etc. I make a Blu-Ray or DVD or even CD depending on how much I'm storing.
 
WD's my book essential have USB3 and go in capacities up to 3TB. It doesn't state the rpm on the WD website but two review websites I found say its 7,200rpm.
 
I have two duplicate internal OS drives in each of my systems. I rotate them every Tuesday - keeps them both current. For back up data, I have duplicate externals in each of three systems. They get routinely sync'd. The externasl HDDs are eSATA cases containing former OS drives that have been upgraded.
 
Look at a sata dock, or esata. Such as these:

http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applicatio...20drive%20dock
Then buy green or otherwise cheap high capacity drives and treat them like tapes.

You can also buy cases to protect them during transport, like these:


http://www.ebay.ca/itm/Anti-Shock-P...US_Drive_Enclosures_Docks&hash=item2ebfdc31aa
(these are actually 2.5" but they do make 3.5" ones, I just search quickly and found that as an example)



That's what I do for my offsite backups, works great! i have daily backups that are done to the same server/array, these backups are for everyday protection of things like me accidentally deleting a file, or if I want to revert code to an earlier version. Every couple days (sometimes weeks) I'll pop a drive in the removable dock and run a backup job. Each drive has a pointer to a job file, so I can create different jobs for different drives, so I just pop in the drive, run a command which will auto mount it by label (I have them all labeled the same) and it will check the pointer and run the job corresponding to that drive. It's actually a really decent setup. Eventually I want to improve it where it keeps track of each drive and also has retention period, so when it's done, it tells me what drive to put in next, and when to run it (now, or later). But for now I just use a spreadsheet and don't really have a proper schedule, I just make sure to rotate them around.
 
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You can always do a RAID 1 solution, have your data backed up on an equal sized drive. That also has the benefit of increasing your read speeds sometimes.
As for external solutions, it depends on how much you need. I have a 4TB Seagate GoFlex external USB 3.0 drive and it works fine for occasionally backing up my storage drive on my PC. The ratings say that it needs some special software or firmware to use on a Mac however.
 
Kusnierek said:
You can always do a RAID 1 solution, have your data backed up on an equal sized drive. That also has the benefit of increasing your read speeds sometimes.
As for external solutions, it depends on how much you need. I have a 4TB Seagate GoFlex external USB 3.0 drive and it works fine for occasionally backing up my storage drive on my PC. The ratings say that it needs some special software or firmware to use on a Mac however.
Click to expand...
RAID is not the type of backup I'm looking for. Thanks though.
 
Razel started off with a great statement "it depends on your needs" and then started to go into it but did not go deep enough. What are you looking to protect against (hard drive failure, virus, theft, fire)? How much data are you looking to protect? How often does that data change? I am sure that there are 100 more questions to ask.

For everyone in this thread with CDs, DVDs, internal hard drives, external hard drives, RAID, etc... How are you protected if there is a fire and your equipment is destroyed or a theft and someone steals all of your equipment. For those of you in certain areas of the country - how does this protect against hurricane, flood, forest fires, etc...

For everyone with hard drives (internal or external and with or without RAID) how are you protected against viruses wiping out or corrupting all of your data

All of these are good plans but none of them are comprehensive.

Here is how I created my backup plan (and I am still evaluating if there is a better way to do this).

I have almost 2 TB of photos (RAW and JPG) as well as approximately 1 TB or other data that I would like to keep backed up. This does not include another 1-2 TB of other data that I really do not care if it is backed up.

- To protect against a hard drive failure I have RAID 1 set up (mirroring). Hard drives are so cheap that this was simpler than RAID 5 and gave me more options (e.g. I can take either drive offline and have a full back up that I can connect to another computer)
- To protect against viruses I have a lot of this information on DVD. I am debating here whether to keep it on DVD or use another hard drive (I am worried that something can erase the hard drive while nothing can erase the DVD aside from damaging the disc.)
- The DVDs are stored offsite - to this day I am unsure of how long DVDs can be stored before they cannot be read
- With the photos I also store the JPGs only on Shutterfly (I used to have them on Shutterfly and Ofoto. Ofoto is now sending all of the photos to Shutterfly so I have everything on Shutterfly
- Lastly I bought online storage through GoDaddy. I configured this to NEVER delete or overwrite uploaded files. I upload the file with a new name (suffix). This protects me against something corrupting a file and me overwriting the good file with the corrupted one or something deleting a file on my computer and "deletion" getting backed up (deleting the file in my online backup). I only bought a few hundred GIGs. I am uploading everything there. As I run out of space I will add more. This is taking forever to upload (I have been uploading 100 GB for the past three days and it is still only about 50% done.) I am hoping by the time I need more space the price will drop or I will have a coupon code or can arrange a better deal. Everyone should be aware of a small (but could be very expensive) issue with GoDaddy. One hundred TB is relatively cheap 100GB is $1.74 month with a five year contract. That is $20.88 per year and I had a coupon code that took off 20%. Adding another 100GB to your storage adds $139.80 per year. When I wanted another 100GB GB I had my choice of getting an additional account for $20.88 or adding to mine for $139.80. That was a no brainer. I bought many additional accounts. It is all transparent to me when I am using them.

In order to summarize my long winded answer. I wanted to protect against:

- Oops factor (accidentally deleting or overwriting something)
- Hard drive failure (dead hard drive)
- Corrupt hard drive (the computer sees the drive and will continue to write to it and not alert me of an issue but the data is corrupted)
- Virus or other malware that would change, delete, etc... my files
- Computer failure that may damage the motherboard and hard drives
- Theft (somebody stealing my computer and/or hard drives)
- Fire (similar to theft)

All of this sounds complex but in reality everything is automated except for the making of DVDs
 
I noticed you're searching with both USB 3.0 and 7200RPM as your variables. One thing to note is that many large capacity drives, especially external ones, won't display their spinning speed. Often this is because they want to downplay the fact that such a large drive is actually a 5400RPM or 5900RPM drive, but not always. By selecting 7200RPM, you're likely disqualifying a few 7200RPM drives from appearing in your search results.
As an example, this drive is said by one of the reviewers to be USB 3.0 and 7200RPM:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148848
It's a Seagate, and those are generally a mixed bag these days, however.

Also, have you considered buying an inexpensive USB 3.0 hard drive enclosure and putting a regular internal drive inside? That way you can be sure you're getting the drive specs you want, and you might even shave off some of the cost since internal drives are often (but not always) less expensive, even with the enclosure cost. Just some food for thought.
 
TRCDROM said:
For everyone in this thread with CDs, DVDs, internal hard drives, external hard drives, RAID, etc... How are you protected if there is a fire and your equipment is destroyed or a theft and someone steals all of your equipment. For those of you in certain areas of the country - how does this protect against hurricane, flood, forest fires, etc...
Click to expand...

By storing some of them off site.

Theft is harder to protect from though. Backups don't help, the only half decent way to help against that is whole disk encryption, and even then since they'll have it on hand they can brute force it for unlimited time (it's not like a network attack where they can be blocked) so eventually they will get the data.

The only true way to protect from theft is prevention. Ex: all data should be in a central highly secure location. Idealy that location should kill or knock them out, or trap them, if they do make it in unauthorized. FM200 systems are great for that. Just hook it up to the burglar alarm.
 
Red Squirrel said:
By storing some of them off site.

Theft is harder to protect from though. Backups don't help, the only half decent way to help against that is whole disk encryption, and even then since they'll have it on hand they can brute force it for unlimited time (it's not like a network attack where they can be blocked) so eventually they will get the data.

The only true way to protect from theft is prevention. Ex: all data should be in a central highly secure location. Idealy that location should kill or knock them out, or trap them, if they do make it in unauthorized. FM200 systems are great for that. Just hook it up to the burglar alarm.
Click to expand...
I used to work for a bank that had backups delievered to an environment controlled off site storage by an armed guard. I think this is out of my budget, unfortunatly.
 
I have essentially 5 backup copies of all items I deem important enough I would not want to lose. All are on mechanical drives. One is on my 1TB media player, one on my 2.5" USB 1TB drive, one on my desktop 1TB drive on a BlacX USB store (turned off), and two 1TB 2.5" thunderbolt external drives in Raid1.

I figure if I leave one copy at a relative's place, and another in my car, one permanent copy in house that's always offline, and two in raid1 I should be set.

The one's that are set to raid are the ones that gets the most current store. From there I would occasionally backup the raid onto my offline store. Then update my vehicle's copy.

One thing I haven't looked into or done yet is encrypt the HD that's meant for the vehicle, in case my car gets stolen or broken into.

Oh, and there's also cloud storage, but for 400GB of data I only pick and choose what I want on the cloud.
 
I have an external USB 3.0 HDD for maintaining an up-to-date back up of my Steam, videos, music, pictures, and documents, while things that I deem the utmost important I have also on my MacBook and my USB flash drive, just in case.
 
I have had real good luck with Carbonite.

The best thing I love about online backup's is that I don't have to remember to backup the data, it is done automatically. Also I like that it is always off-site.
 
I have an external drive I got really cheap off ebay. Not very big but does the job. The Carbonite thing sounds tempting. Never know when that external drive might take a dump
 
Has anyone here tried using tapes for home solution ?
Having never used one, I am quite curious about their pros and cons in this scenario.

PS
I dont meant the thousand dollars T10000C tapes, but cheaper ones meant for home users if there's any.
 
I use a 3 hard drive backup strategy for my file server. This has mostly home movies and pictures that are irreplacable, but also our music and tax documents, etc....

-- Everytime I need a hard drive for this system, I buy *3* identical drives
-- Install OS on all three seperately (so they can all boot if needed)
-- copy files to one
-- setup nightly rsync script for mirroring one to the other
-- use rsync script to mirror 1 --> 2 then 1 --> 3

1 & 2 get installed internally for nightly backups
#3 gets taken to work and locked in a drawer in the event of a fire / natural disaster at my house. Periodically (like every 2-3 months) I'll bring #3 home, sync it with the others and take it back to work.


My rules are:
- never trust a hard drive... have at least 2 backups
- don't keep anything important on my or my wife's computer. Assume the HDD or SSD will crash on these machines. Keep the important files on the file server, where they get backed up.
- don't use a hard drive (even for backup) longer than 5 years. In the old days I'd use a >5 year old drive for the windows swap file. These days, most people have more memory than they need and I have SSDs for good swap performance in the unlikely event I ever need more than 8GB, so I just e-waste them after 5 years in service.

I have had a prety high failure rate for drives in service 6 years or longer. About 15% of all personal hard drives I've used have failed in the 6 year range. This is why I put my cutoff at 5 years.
 
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turn_pike said:
Has anyone here tried using tapes for home solution ?
Having never used one, I am quite curious about their pros and cons in this scenario.

PS
I dont meant the thousand dollars T10000C tapes, but cheaper ones meant for home users if there's any.
Click to expand...

Tapes? There's a reason you haven't heard much about tape drives in the last 5 years.

Check out tape drives at newegg... you'll see it's much cheaper to use HDDs. It's also faster, easier, and more convenient.

As pros and cons go, HDDs are all pros, no cons vs. a small home tape solution. I suppose one pro for tapes is if your tape is too small, then you can get another tape for cheaper than another hard drive, but if you only need 500 GB, then buy a 3TB hard drive "just in case" instead of a tape drive, you're still WAY ahead on cost by using the HDD.
 
Concillian said:
I use a 3 hard drive backup strategy for my file server. This has mostly home movies and pictures that are irreplacable, but also our music and tax documents, etc....

-- Everytime I need a hard drive for this system, I buy *3* identical drives
-- Install OS on all three seperately (so they can all boot if needed)
-- copy files to one
-- setup nightly rsync script for mirroring one to the other
-- use rsync script to mirror 1 --> 2 then 1 --> 3

1 & 2 get installed internally for nightly backups
#3 gets taken to work and locked in a drawer in the event of a fire / natural disaster at my house. Periodically (like every couple months) I'll bring #3 home, sync it with the others and take it back to work.
Click to expand...

Why not just run the drives in RAID1?
 
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