Last night I discovered that my backup hard drive had gone kaput. It was maybe ~3 years old. Kinda disappointed about that. Anyway, I'm looking at potential backup solutions. I'm curious as to people's experience/preferences with the following:
Any thoughts?
All are decent options and have different ups and downs...I use external hard drives with a trayless drive rack (so you can plug the bare drive into the front of the computer). I think this is the best solution, they're a little safer than a NAS box (no vulnerability to power surge or potentially malware when not in use), and the cheapest solution, but they're a little more work (you have to plug them in).
I'm adding a cloud backup system for offsite backup (see the cloud backup thread.) Speed is always the biggest problem with cloud backup, and most of the time security is a major one. I recommend that whatever you upload is encrypted with a key that only you control.
My understanding is the nice thing about a NAS is low power use potential and small form factor. Both are very low priorities for me so I'm turning my old desktop into mini server running Debian with two 1TB SATA drives with RAID 1. My stumbling block at the moment is the MoBo isn't recognizing the SATA ports it. My wife didn't like the cloud idea for some reason.
I'm also keeping actual backups (two different USB external HDDs) in a fire safe.
I've never backed up anything ... just bought an external hard drive yesterday ... a solid state one, so no (or fewer) moving parts ... it's going to take several yrs to fill up, then I'll buy another one
wbjones wrote: I've never backed up anything ... just bought an external hard drive yesterday ... a solid state one, so no (or fewer) moving parts ... it's going to take several yrs to fill up, then I'll buy another one
SSDs are vastly more robust in terms of resisting physical damage, but they're more likely to fail suddenly and unrecoverably without warning (you could say "electronically more fragile")...but you've got the data backed up and that's what's important.
I have two external hard drives. They were like $80.00 each. I keep one in my pickup and on in my office and swap them whenever I remember. So my data is never more than a couple days old even if one packs it in.
I guess I should add that I need to do something so that I can back up 2-3 computers to whatever solution I choose, even if that winds up being 2-3 external hard drives. It's potentially up to ~1.5TB or so of data for an all-in solution, if that makes any difference.
You can get a 1.5TB hard drive and back up to separate directories or partitions on it.
For frequent access stuff, I just use my free Dropbox account (11gb).
A few years ago, I bought a device called a Pogo plug. The ideas is you plug in an external HD (or more than one) and it makes a NAS. I didn't really use it after the first test. Then they offered me unlimited "cloud" storage for $20/year. Didn't pay for that. Sounds good in theory.
For long term storage in the house, I now have a QNAP NAS device with two 2tb hard drives (mirrored). I dump family photos onto it periodically as well as everything I've ever saved for work, and my music collection which I never listen to. It has the capability to record security cameras, and serve up video and audio, and a whole lot more.. but I only use it as storage.
... Interestingly story about this box. I keep it on a shelf tucked between floor joists above my basement ceiling. I had a contractor tear up some flooring and replace it. They used a tool that vibrated apparently, because I found my NAS on the basement floor after they were done. Basement is 10' tall, so it was a long drop. The fan was broken, and the case was bent, but I got a new fan on eBay. Miraculously, the hard drives didn't fail and it works just fine. But I'm keeping my eyes on the drive status LED's.
I have a 2tb external drive. I backup the NAS on this, and then it resides at work for "off site" safekeeping.
So there's that.
I bought my son a laptop for Christmas.. and Amazon offered me free unlimited cloud storage for a year. Thinking about giving it a try.
TL;DR.... Mostly I use Dropbox.
Edit: if you keep your files fairly organized, and you can remember to do the backing up.. a simple pair of external HDs is probably still fine. Rotate and keep one off site.
Done this twice, both with Synology two-disk NAS boxes, and have been very happy with both. I have the drive set to spin down after 30 minutes of no activity so they're not always humming. Used 5400 RPM server-class drives so I should get many years of use without problems. Easy to set up and rarely think about the thing.
I like Spideroak for cloud backup. They have fairly nice security for a category that is all about putting your stuff on someone else's computer. I had a subscription for two or three years. I decided to drop them recently when I realized that I'd rather just do it myself.
About that - I bought a Mac a few months back, and I just use Time Machine to an external USB hard drive. My Macbook has a 512GB SSD, and my external hard drive is 250GB and only USB 2.0, so I might do some sort of upgrade to a multi-terabyte solution.
You didn't mention what operating system you're working with.
I just bought Newertech RAID 1 drives for the house and both daughters. Girls have been running without regular backups (ahh, youth) and the desktop's single backup drive crapped out. This way there are at least redundant drives.
I swear buy the Silicon Power Rugged External Drives. My first was 500GB and cost $100. My second was 1TB and cost $100. My third was 2TB and cost $100. I have two, one close by for regular backups. The second is in the safe and gets a dump of the first monthly. I have some stuff in the cloud, mostly Apple stuff. 1.5 TB of photos is expensive to cloud store.
Duke wrote: I just bought Newertech RAID 1 drives for the house and both daughters. Girls have been running without regular backups (ahh, youth) and the desktop's single backup drive crapped out. This way there are at least redundant drives.
On the topic of RAID, it's a good thing to have in a backup store/NAS but never think that storing data in a RAID array is a backup strategy in itself. RAID only protects against one very specific cause of data loss, individual drive failure. It does nothing for power surges, filesystem damage, malware, or accidental deletion.
So basically you should treat a RAID array no differently than a single drive in terms of backups.
I've got a home-built server/NAS that's the main destination for the other computers' backups and that one occasionally gets backed up on an external HDD. One issue with NAS boxes is that you have to regularly replace HDDs when they start showing signs of going bad - I end up replacing them every 2-3 years atm.
For a very simple approach, CostCo has USB 3 5TB external HDDs from Seagate for IIRC less than $200. That's what I currently use for backing up the NAS.
All that doesn't protect against the computers or drives getting fried in a house fire or massive power surge, so the real important data (of which there isn't a lot) goes into an MS OneDrive. Encrypted, of course.
Which reminds me, I really need to go buy a fireproof safe for the backup disks and for important document storage.
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