I finally decided to back up my music, photos, art work etc to a Seawhite 4TB external hard drive which has promptly bust before being a quarter full. Of course I’ve had it beyond the Amazon returns date, so its a rather pricy door-stop now.
Thing is – looking at Amazon reviews there doesn’t seem to be a reliable external HD – every one has about 12% of reviewers leaving a 1 star complaint about sudden death of the buggers regardless of manufacturer.
Does anyone use cloud storage rather than HD? Any recommended providers? Any external drives you’d stake your digital-lives on?
Thanks in advance
Back Up Baby Back Up – ATM
by 15 Comments
My brother-in-law is in IT and recommended a Buffalo hard drive, which was $89 (about 70 quid) for the 2TB version.
Now I’m no computer wizard, but even I managed to partition it into two 1TB sections, one for music and one for back-ups. Works great with Apple’s Time Machine back-up thingy.
It’s worked flawlessly so far.
A RAID mirror (two drives) is your answer. Failing that, two separate drives and copy everything to both.
One drive will eventually fail, but you’ll have time to copy the contents of the working drive to a fresh one. And so on.
I use a Seagate external drive plus I send everything to Dropbox. I have a program called Syncbak which runs the backups in the middle of the night. You get free cloud all over the place but I pay for Dropbox so they don’t randomly remove it as some providers have done in the past. You get free storage for photos on Amazon so I’ve got a second backup of all the pics there. I use Microsoft OneDrive for work stuff as it integrates well with their other products.
The whole thing was a minor pain to set up but now it runs itself.
I use Carbonite as a cloud backup, have my iTunes library in iTunes Match as well and use Western Digital external drives for local backup and Time Machine. Western Digital chosen purely because when a drive failed well out of warranty they replaced it anyway with no quibbles (the data on it was also in the cloud – phew!). A nice man at the Apple Genius Bar told me they would do this and he was right. Printed off a label send it back and new drive arrived promptly.
Mostly, when external drives fail it’s because a) they’ve been running too hot (enclosure or HDD itself just unsuited to the job – runs hot to the touch – life of HDD shortened) or b) the supplied PSU fails (the manufacturer sought to make a saving and lower the price/make a little more profit, with a bad result). Can often be resurrected with a change of PSU or enclosure.
I have a collection of 4 external USB drives, all duplicating each other. Two Maxtor M3 portable 2.5″ 4TB USB3.0 units (currently £87 each from Amazon) and a couple of Dynamode 3.5″ external USB3.0 enclosures that I got from PC World and fitted with Western Digital Caviar “Green” 3TB HDDs myself. The enclosures are currently £23 each and the hard drives about £90 each.
Both of the Maxtor M3s and both of the Dynamode/WD Caviar combinations run nice and cool and have been reliable, so far, over 3 years.
The Maxtor M3s are powered via their USB connections, so no PSU problems as long as your computers can cope with the load on the USB bus. The Dynamode enclosures have little PSU bricks that never seem to get hotter than “warm”.
One of the M3s is my main music server drive and is attached to a Raspberry Pi NAS in the hall. The other one is just plugged into my music-playing laptop in the sitting room and is an exact duplicate of the NAS drive. The two Dynamode enclosures and their drives are further duplicates of the M3 duplicate and sit on my desk next to my web-browsing laptop. All new music I acquire gets ripped/stored to the NAS for playing and backed up straight away to the other 3 drives. Takes a couple of hours to do the lot.
The M3s are tiny pocket-size things, 120mm x 83mm x 20mm and easily grabbable on the way out in an emergency. At some point I plan to replace the Dynamode enclosures with a couple more M3s. Of course there’s no remote backup, so if there was a severe fire or flood while I was away, I’d possibly be f***ed.
You need a NAS configured as a raid so when a drive fails (and it will) you just take out the bad one and plonk in a new one with no data loss. I’m a Synology fan. No problems in the past 7 years of having it on constantly. It’s accessible from anywhere in the world (ok, it may get blocked in China! ) so no need for any other cloud service.
As for your doorstop, do you know it’s the drive or the box that’s died, if it’s the box then you already have one of the drives for your shiny new NAS!
Fact of life is that HDDs will die, it’s just a matter of when. However, whilst you see a high level of complaints on Amazon for drives dying, you have too remember that its mainly those who have problems that post in reviews, so its nowhere near 12% of drives that are failing. Most drives come with a 3 or 5 year (if you buy the enterprise class) warranty, which means that the majority will survive until this age.
Obviously no consolation if yours is one of those that die and you lose all your data.
So if you really want to secure your data then, as mentioned above, then a RAID configured NAS (network) or DAS (direct) is the way to go. Multiple drives (usually 3 or 4 but at least 2) in a box that are configured to protect if any dies, allowing the failing drive to simply be swapped out. Synology are the market leaders and pretty simple to set up and configure as a “personal cloud” if you wish. I actually use Drobo myself – have a couple (network and direct) and they have always been reliable (the main downside to Drobo is that it uses a proprietary algorithm to configure the data, so if the box dies you can only swap into another Drobo). The nice thing is also that you can start with just a couple of drives and then add more, swap out to bigger capacity as your storage needs grow (my main storage is now 5 x 10TB drives…..).
I have never managed to find a cloud storage solution that meets my requirements – mainly due to the amount of data I have to store. Not only does it get expensive when the data requirements increase, I am always wary of the providers changing their plans etc. I even had an Amazon “unlimited” storage plan for about $60 a year – which they eliminated a couple of years ago, giving you a few months to download anything. Aside from that, I actually calculated it would take over 6 months to upload all my data !! Bandwidth is still very much a problem for cloud storage.
With regards to your current failing drive – as also mentioned above – it may not be the actually drive that has failed and maybe the power supply (this is quite common). Is it a 3.5in (the bigger ones that go in PCs) or 2.5in drive (the slim ones that go in notebooks) ? If its a 3.5in, you can open up the box, take out the HDD and installing in a PC to see if it works. Alternatively, you can get cables / bare external boxes pretty cheap to hook up to USB (or take to a friendly computer store to get them to do).
You mention that its outside the Amazon warranty period, but it may be still within the manufacturers warranty (usually 3 years) – go to Seagate’s website and key in the serial number to check. Note that ripping out the HDD to test yourself will invalidate the warranty !
Say it quietly, but I’ve now been using mega.nz for over two years with no problems whatsoever. You get 50GB storage free and it’s all encrypted.
50, 50? No wonder you haven’t had a date since 1988
Yeah it’s like ten albums. That’s nearly all the music in the world!
PS. I don’t like dates. Spitting the stones out… yeccchh.
Spitting the stones out is the best bit. Reasonably accurate up to 10ft.
Disgusting… but impressive.
(not the first time I’ve said that)
Bet all the girls flock round you – “Look at that Deirdre, he just killed a cat”
Mega.nz, or so a friend of a friend suggests, have a very wide file sharing presence, whatever that is. I would be concerned they will go the way of others in that field and become error 404 like zippy share have become.
I’ve found samsung story drives last well. Had several with no failures.
I have a Mac and use a program called Arq to back up to Amazon AWS cloud service. Cheaper than anything I can find elsewhere for bulk storage. I use their Glacier tier where it costs more if you retrieve data than if you just leave ut alone. suits me as it is strictly backup.
I see Arq does PC now. I think that might be new.
https://www.arqbackup.com