Computer backup devices

Robby

I'm prepping to try and back up one of my computers for a reformatting, and I have a ton of video and various work files to back up.

I'm looking into getting a 500GB or a 1TB drive for the purpose, but I see a LOT of the reviews on Amazon saying the things give out quickly or die unexpectedly, (within as little as three months, or even within days… in between the time of copying some files and reformatting them) and that carries over a number of different brands. If it was just two or three reviews I'd write it off, but its quite a large number which makes me apprehensive.

We have one at my office and my experience with that is fine, but... the sheer number of potential dying reviews worries me. (Though I realize its the people who have problems that are most likely to make a review, and about 9/10 of the reviews are positive... but when there's something like 100 negative reviews out of a 1000, that's worrisome. What's the general experience here?

(I've also been similarly considering a 32 of 64 GB flash drive, but those have similar reviews... while the 8 and 16 GB ones seem to work fine for years.)

Sakonosolo

I think the portable HDD (if you want portable) is Western Digital and it's been working for years. In general I never really looked too much at the different types, except that I heard that Green drives have issues caused by their power saving. Just don't get Seagate as at least recently those have apparently been pretty prone to failures. Obviously though, hardware isn't going to have a 0% failure rate. You can avoid shipping related damages though if you get it at a store if that's possible.

Might be smart if this stuff is important to buy two devices, either two HDDs or two flash drives or a mixture and have two backups like that.

Enlighten

Any thing you keep on one drive is as good as lost. The key to backups is having at least three copies with one remote in case your house burns or you're robbed etc. Of course this can get expensive but if this stuff is really important to you there is no other way.

If you want to outsource this; there are services like http://www.carbonite.com/ or https://spideroak.com/ these deal with the redundancy if you choose to trust them.

Or you can do it yourself and have 3 copies of all your important files on your own hard drives or NAS or even use something like dropbox or google drive for one of the copies.

There are programs to help you keep this straight. They are not terribly user friendly though. https://git-annex.branchable.com/ is one such program. It works best on Macs or Linux and is a bit crippled on Windows. You also need to understand git http://git-scm.com/ upon which it is built. The best way to use it is via the command line but there is a somewhat crippled graphical interface that might be easy to use even on Windows. http://blog.bacula.org/ is another backup program that is even harder to use and configure.

The reason I mention automation solutions here is because backups especially redundant backups are extremely boring and tedious so if you don't automate them you will not do them.

Also stay clear of Lacie drives they are the worse. If you want studies of drive life see this. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/

good luck you are going to need it.