Storage

[Peter Blake]

what is a good safe method of digital storage? right now I'm backing up the good stuff to my website, but I know a lot of people swear by external drives. what's hot?

 

[Dave Green]

I back up to external drives. One of my Xmas presents will make this easier and cheaper

http://www.maplin.co.uk/p/2535-inch-sataide-usb-dock-with-hub-and-cardreader-a05jy

I back up twice - and keep a copy at home and another at work. If it doesn't exist in three places - it doesn't exist.

 

[Chris Dodkin]

Depends how far you want to take it Peter

Two copies on different devices/media is always a good safety net - unlikely to loose both at the same time

You can buy Raid drives - basically two separate drives in one box - the drive automatically writes your image file to both physical drives at the same time, making a duplicate if you like.

You can back up over the InterWebs to the 'cloud' but if you have a lot of files, and/or large files, this may or may not be feasible

Personally - I store my files on a Raid drive in my Mac desktop - then make an additional copy to a USB drive that I keep elsewhere most of the time.

 

[Keith Hollister]

Yeah - the USB bare drive docks with a bunch of 3.5" HDD's is the cheapest, fastest solution for significant amounts of data. I also concur with Dave - I have 3 rotating sets of drives I clone everything to. 2 at home in one of the safes and one offsite. I also use Backblaze and keep a copy of some stuff in the cloud.

RAID is not really a backup solution - it protects against a drive failure but is useless against a natural disaster, theft, etc.

 

[Paul Lange]

I have 2 external drives and use Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner on my iMac. On the PC I have used Todo Backup which is available in free and paid versions. I also use Windows Backup in Win 7 which by all accounts is very good, easy to use and seems to work fine for me. For drives I would stay away from Maxtor and Seagate.

 

[Keith Hollister]

I have 2 external drives and use Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner on my iMac. On the PC I have used Todo Backup which is available in free and paid versions. I also use Windows Backup in Win 7 which by all accounts is very good, easy to use and seems to work fine for me. For drives I would stay away from Maxtor and Seagate.

There are only 2 major OEM's of HDD's at this point - Western Digital and Seagate. Toshiba is the only other independent manufacturer, but they are a minor player compared to Seagate and WD.

Maxtor ceased to exist in 2006 when it was absorbed into Seagate. Seagate also recently acquired the Samsung HDD business and that brand has disappeared. WD recently purchased Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and while Hitachi branded HDD's are still being sold, they are now part of WD. Most of Toshiba's HDD business is 2.5" laptop drives.

While I would tend to choose WD over Seagate, all of the large scale reliability studies I have seen recently indicate there is no significant difference in MTBF between brands or even in consumer vs enterprise product lines. For NAS/RAID use I favor the WD Red or Blue lines since the error recovery timing is compatible with HW RAID controllers (consumer drives tend to drop out of the array). For individual drives (or JBOD use), you might as well purchase based on price for a given capacity and performance.

I probably have close to 3 dozen 2/3/4 TB HDD's from WD, Seagate, Samsung & Hitachi between my computers, NAS and backup sets, and have to say there seems to be little to differentiate brands from a reliability standpoint.

The fact is HDD's have gotten a lot more reliable, faster and quieter than what many are remembering from years ago. It largely has turned into a commodity. Just be sure to use drives with Time Limited Error Recovery (TLER) enabled for use in RAID arrays. The relatively new WD Red series is the most cost effective solution presently for use in arrays. There were some firmware issues in the first batch, but that has been OBE for some time now.

 

[Paul Lange]

Good points, Keith. I have never been into Computers and IT but for the company where I used to work I looked after much of the IT. I left a while back now but never really kept my finger on the pulse until something went wrong or we had to update the equipment. This was something that defaulted to me because my colleagues tended not to be able to wrap their heads round it. My old MD was a self confessed Mac and IT expert and would often wonder over to the servers to randomly change settings in order to make "improvements". A few times we came into the office in the morning to find the whole system down. After a couple of hours of head scratching the MD would get round to phoning in to explain that the previous evening he had been making his "improvements" but there must have been something wrong with the equipment because it all stopped working working. At least it helped my learning curve.

Over the years I saw several Maxtor (in the beginning) and Seagate HDDs die but never had that with WD or Hitachi brands; this was over a 14 year period on a system that only had hardware changes when something failed. Despite any recent developments I personally stick to WD and Hitachi for this reason.

 

[Aaron Quinn]

Good info here, thanks for sharing!

I'm thinking of going with something looking like this - my macbook air only has 128gig ssd so a 1tb external drive as my main working drive and backing up to my synology 2 bay NAS. I need to figure out an off site backup solution as well, either a drive I take to work or an online solution. Not sure yet.

 

[Aaron Quinn]

As far as disk failure goes, this is a little old coming from back in ought 7 but has some good info http://storagemojo.com/2007/02/19/googles-disk-failure-experience/