Author Topic: Hard Drive for Backing Up  (Read 3061 times)

Garden Manager

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Hard Drive for Backing Up
« on: March 31, 2015, 12:52:48 »
I have to confess to being very lax when it comes to PC backups. I just have never got into the habit of doing it reguarly. I have recently though decided to make more effort. To do this i need a new external hard drive to save the backups onto. There lies the problem

I have done lots of searches and read lots of reviews and still cannot decide on a make let alone a model. Some look good in one breath than you read a particular review (on a certain well known online retail site for example) and the whole make not just model appears to be no good.

I am looking at a 500gb drive priced between £30 and £50 for a windows 7 home premium 64bit PC thats around 4 years old. Anyone have any suggestions please?

kGarden

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Re: Hard Drive for Backing Up
« Reply #1 on: March 31, 2015, 13:30:32 »
Couple of tangential thoughts:

Backups are better with several sets of media.  What if you backup to the external drive and then when you need to restore from it there is a fault on it, or the area on it where the files you need reside?

Will it be off-site? i.e. survive a fire in the primary location.  One answer is to have, say, two drives and take one with you to parents / in-laws each time you visit
them. If you are going to do that then a somewhat more rugged drive that will survive being carted back-and-forth might be worth looking for.

Also, best to have more than one copy of your files.  You might modify a file, wrongly, today, then back it up, and THEN realise that the most recent change you made was duff and want an EARLIER version back again.

You can achieve that on an external drive by making folders at root level of 31Mar2015 etc. and then copying everything off your C: drive BELOW that point on the external. When it gets full delete the oldest root-folder to release the space.  On that basis you might want a larger drive so it can hold several copies of your C: drive.  I doubt that a Terrabyte (or even a multi-Terrabyte) drive is much more money than a 500GB one.

Yet another alternative is to use an online backup service.  That will send just your changed files over the internet to the "cloud".  That will store a number of previous-versions and so on and won't run out of space :) - although they'll charge you more if you use more ..

alkanet

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Re: Hard Drive for Backing Up
« Reply #2 on: March 31, 2015, 13:43:17 »
the external HD i had fail was a Seagate (2TB), and a Seagate 3TB I still use acts a bit funny (randomly launches file manager)
The Toshiba 2TB and a Maxtor 500GB work fine. The Maxtor is 14 years old
So on that limited experience, i'd avoid Seagate

also if you're moving files from the PC to the extHD, it's not a backup

Garden Manager

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Re: Hard Drive for Backing Up
« Reply #3 on: March 31, 2015, 14:57:58 »
Seagate drives seem to have driver issues with Win7. Toshiba drives appear to have weak usb connectors. WD dont seem to last as long as they used to (according to Amazon reviewers). I have two CBA Digital HDDs (used for extra storage) bought some years ago, they are a bit slow but so far no problems with them. Unfortunately they are no longer available, otherwise i wouldnt hesitate to get another just for backups. I have tried to clear enough space on the largest CBA drive (500gb)for a basic backup but the backup always needs too much space!

Thanks for replies

 

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