Posted 10 November 2023

Best drives to use for back ups?

Hi,

With all the new tech about now, I'm unsure what types of drives would be suitable as back up drives, especially with differemt caches, DRAM and interfaces these days.

They probably won't be accessed as primary drives, just back up devices for peace of mind etc. I'm thinking about buying a couple of 1TB drives so I have two copies.

I'm undecided whether I might use one of the back ups as a secondary drive for music etc, or should I just buy another drive for that and keep the back up drives as purely back ups?

Are SSD drives used for back ups now, or are old style spinning hard drives still a thing?

I notice a few of the SSD companies do external drives, are they suitable? For example, could I just buy several Sandisk Ultras and put them in a caddy?

Cheers in advance.
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  1. tardytortoise's avatar
  2. aLV426's avatar
    Note that you aren't asking the correct question - there is no such thing as a back up device. What you need is a back up strategy. This all depends on how important your data is and how quickly you need to recover it. Simply buying another hard drive is not a back up solution.
    There is no quick answer here. Sure having multiple hard drives allows you to store copies of your data, however that's not a backup strategy. What happens if your data gets hit with a virus or ransomware? Drive gets stolen, house burns down, etc. or the simple "oops I clicked move when I meant to copy" and overwrote the entire drive?

    Recently my mate who stores all his data the cloud - and duplicates it between iCloud & Google cloud lost access and was denied viewing his entire photo collection. He did manage to convince Apple that it was his account and was able to access the content, however he has still not been able to recover his Google account.

    Depending on the importance & frequency of updates to your data you should also consider offline, off site storage. Offloading a monthly or yearly set of family pics to external media and having it stored offsite (at your parents/neighbours/friends house or, as I used to do, until they changed the charge from £30/year to £45/month - keep it in a safety deposit box at your local bank)...
    BrambleJam1S6's avatar
    Author
    Hiya,

    I was actually about to ask your opinion in another thread I'd been reading here, so I'm glad you've chimed in.

    After watching the video from Explaining Comupters and reading the blog post, I now understand your consistent point re: strategy rather than device/s, and have drawn up somewhat of a plan using the 321 method.

    I can imagine losing photos of loved ones, it sounds awful and not the type of lesson I want to learn retrospectively with regret.

    Cheers.
  3. C0mm0d0re_K1d's avatar
    You need multiple backups of your data in multiple forms and locations. Back in the day, I was taught to keep 1 local backup, One locked away in a fireproof box elsewhere on the site and one locked away off site.

    You also need to replace the storage devices after a period of time, ideally before failure. All forms of storage media can degrade over time, rendering the data possibly irretrievable.
    guilbert53's avatar
    Good point about replacing storage devices over time.

    I have FOUR Western Digital 6TB external hard drives (about 3 or 4 years old) and I back up everything I have four times, once on each external hard drive so they all contain exactly the same files. These backups go back decades (photos, documents, music etc).

    One of them is stored at a relatives house offsite.

    Because I am constantly plugging and unplugging them one of the connectors INSIDE the case where the mains cable plugs in has become loose and only a very small movement of the mains cable stops the drive.

    It has now become so loose inside that the drive no longer works no matter how much I wiggle the mains cable and I will have to break open the case and use the hard drive in another case.

    If this had been my only external hard drive backup I would have been in trouble but luckily I have 4 external hard drives with the same thing on them so I am reasonably covered.

    Which is why people say ONE backup is never enough., and why we all need to consider replacing our drives every now and again.

    p.s. I also still have the four PREVIOUS 4TB drives (probably about 8 years old) that I used (before I bought the 6TB drives) with all the backup data still on them but these are in a sealed box and I never touch them. (edited)
  4. Justintime12's avatar
    As for software, I use freefilesync which mirrors my pc folders to my nas hdd in real time.

    freefilesync.org/man…ync

    Also use macrium reflect free edition to do an automatic monthly backup to a separate hdd in my pc

    m.majorgeeks.com/fil…tml

    Then use mega to mirror my photos folder to the cloud (50gb free but now only 20gb)


    mega.io/pri…ing
  5. MonkeysUncle's avatar
    I use a freeview satbox, and upload videos to hdd connected to it.

    I also backup to SD cards and cloud.

    Also if you use Google you can share photos, which I do with the Mrs so her phone backs all our pictures up to her cloud storage too. And mine will upload all of hers to my cloud.
    C0mm0d0re_K1d's avatar
    Backing up to SD or other types of memory cards or sticks is not a good idea. Even if they are industrial, extreme or high endurance cards. They will likely fail way before any mechanical HDD or SSD.

    For memory cards and optical disc's, you should image them for long term storage.
  6. tardytortoise's avatar
    In addition to all the good points made and the excellent video, don't forget to include in your strategy a paragraph about a disaster recovery exercise. After all a strategy is no good if the restore doesn't work. So, once in a while just pretend a disaster and attempt recovery from your 3-2-1 copies.

    I should also add you need to determine your periodicty over volatility. Every one is different and as long as it works for you, then fine. But no point copying your data more often than it changes. I get by with a monthly routine. I'm also not a fan of true incremental backups as such, and not a fan of any propiatary software ( a big exception being Timeshift in Linux Mint - although that is for system restore points rather than data/file backup/copy.) I'm also not a fan of synchronicity into cloud storage. (edited)
  7. greencode's avatar
    That’s what I do. I have two 1tb drives. One connects to my Mac and take incremental backups via Time Machine and the other takes a backup of the backup drive. I’ve got a couple of NVME SSD drives so cost around £100 in total to set up.
    BrambleJam1S6's avatar
    Author
    Cheers. Yeah I think I'll do something similar using a combo of SSD, HDD, cloud and flash drives.
  8. EndlessWaves's avatar
    Generally speaking backup is a very undemanding workload so unless you've got some unusual requirements then any drive will do the job fine.
    BrambleJam1S6's avatar
    Author
    Thankfully it's just music, along with important sentimental media of loved ones, probably not even 1TB.

    The music is nothing I can't replace, but the thought of losing the other files has pushed my anxiety about back ups into overdrive. I've already pushed some of it onto commercial cloud storage, but my OCD tells me having duplicates locally would be prudent.
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