6TB upwards External Hard Drive

jeffk

So, I wake up a pc wont boot, 4 disk hard drive error, an old old internal drive I have, the last of my many internal drives that failed.

I want to get a 6TB upwards USB3 external drive, is there any recommendations on a site/model?

Thanks

K.O.Kiki

Internal drives are still more reliable than externals.

AFAIK you're better off with internal + cloud services for large sets of data.

jeffk

K.O.Kiki wrote: »

Internal drives are still more reliable than externals.

AFAIK you're better off with internal + cloud services for large sets of data.

How long is normal? Ive gotten 4 or more internal over the years and have generally failed after a few years

Ive 881gb to back up, would cloud not be much dearer than once off physical drive?

ED E

Consumer drives have a ~3YR warranty. That means the OEMs know failure rates become significant after that. They'll only offer a warranty if very few will avail of it. Can go to 10yrs, but the odds of a death increase with each power on hour.


Pay $6/mo for Crashplan or Backblaze or Carbonite. I've got 700GB backed up to the US (encrypted client side).

jeffk

ED E wrote:

Pay $6/mo for Crashplan or Backblaze or Carbonite. I've got 700GB backed up to the US (encrypted client side).

Thanks ed e

Seen crashplan mentioned in another thread.

Which one would you recommend? Any extra benefits over gdrive etc?

jeffk

Done some googling and seen from other sites on threads here crashplan is the way to go.

Basically the drive that died was backup for pictures music etc, so not as bad as my videos. I was going 6Tb to change to my main video drive and use smaller ones for documents etc, but ill try this cloud for a year and see

deandean

After a few failures of the main HDD in my PC I spent good money on a high quality HDD, a WD Black. It wasn't cheap but it has been completely reliable. And it's fast. Combine it with a SSD for the operating system.

ED E

How reliable your HDD is shouldnt matter. A failure should be an inconvenience nothing more.


Back in the day your photos were hard copies, film and prints. Floods and fire are the only threat there and not that common. Digital media regularly dies.

Your CV from 2007 probably doesnt matter to you, but pictures and videos of your wedding, kids birth, first day at school, honeymoon in the Bahamas? They're valuable.

3 is 2
2 is 1
1 is None.

At worst you should have 1 copy locally and one offsite (in the cloud). If you're technically good then the ideal setup is original, backup, backup of backup in the cloud.

jeffk

Changed from Crashplan to Backblaze

Crashplan 4Mb vs Backblaze 12Mb , no competition when you have almost a TB and no backup of data. Couldn't fault Crashplan customer care regarding refund

Carbonite doesn't no external drives so a non runner

ED E

I run a server OS and require TNO so crashplan is the only option, even if slow. Mostly static data so thats ok.

jeffk

Different horses for different courses and all that

At least 99 percent of this is going up on a cloud to stay there safely(I hope) forever

stimpson

FWIW, Google Photos gives you free unlimited storage @12 megapixel. It will resample higher resolutions.

jeffk

stimpson wrote: »

FWIW, Google Photos gives you free unlimited storage megapixel. It will resample higher resolutions.

I do use them to backup when im out and about and then sync to pc,easier than cables.

Think I might set up another google account and use it as photo storage separate from my life one.

Thanks for the reminder

slave1

8TB external on Amazon, £180, has to be the cheapest cost per TB above the 6TB mark

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01IAD5ZC6/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

jeffk

slave1 wrote:

8TB external on Amazon, £180, has to be the cheapest cost per TB above the 6TB mark

I seen that thanks.

If I didnt spend over 700 on mountain bike I think I'd have gotten this.

Thankfully after almost two weeks my drive is on Backblazes server,hopefully won't have to do that again

jeffk

So much for online backup.

Finished my backup, come up to pc,backup frozen.

Follow their guidlines, lost about four days worth of uploaded files.

Looks like I will be buying the hardrive after all

deandean

jeffk wrote: »

So much for online backup.

Finished my backup, come up to pc,backup frozen.

Follow their guidlines, lost about four days worth of uploaded files.

Looks like I will be buying the hardrive after all

Rats!
Which backup app was that?

jeffk

deandean wrote: »

Rats!
Which backup app was that?

I know, upload 880Gb or so, come back hourish later, get it unfrozen,you need to upload 140Gb

That was Backblaze
Crashplan speeds was about 3-4Mbps(i think thats right)
Carbonite dont support external without paying more
The rest are silly money

Almost go dropbox and set my documents external drive as my dropbox folder

ED E

Out of curiosity is the backblaze client a memory guzzler like CP? CP's is a Java app thats horrible for it even after deduplication and live monitoring is disabled.

jeffk

ED E wrote: »

Out of curiosity is the backblaze client a memory guzzler like CP? CP's is a Java app thats horrible for it even after deduplication and live monitoring is disabled.

Seemed to be ok on my PC, I even cranked the network settings to fastest and never effected web page loading,downloading, uploading etc

Far less options than CP, so probably half the reason its not resource hungry

cormie

I'm looking for a backup solution right now, Crashplan seems to be leading the way so far, it has unlimited storage.

My set up is quite simple. Until now, I was backing up to two external hard drives (manually) and then important files to SugarSync too (only about 60gb worth) I'd rarely do the external backups, so I'm thinking far better to have full backup in the cloud and only need one external as I'd be more likely to keep one regularly backed up than two.

The goal would be to have one laptop and one external hard drive, but the laptop storage is 1TB, where the external is 2TB. I have over 1TB of data and want to keep a few 100GB's free on my laptop too, so I'm thinking best solution is:

Cloud keeps all data encrypted - 1TB Laptop keeps 500GB (200gb of which is media I don't need encrypted) of regularly used data and 500GB free space - 2TB ext hard drive keeps personal files encrypted and then media files not, so that they can plug and play into the likes of a projector, stereo system or anything that can read USB files.

I haven't found a solution for this yet. Need to wait until Crashplan live chat open again to ask them more questions, but I believe that they only backup encrypted, so I'll need to find out is it possible to store data that's been deleted off the PC or not or does it only keep what's currently on the laptop backed up, and whether it's possible to exclude folders I'm backing up to the cloud, from being backed up to the external, in which case, I would organise my media that it populates my laptop, is uploaded to the cloud, then when I plug an external drive in, all non media files sync to the external drive and then I manually drag and drop the media files from laptop to ext media folder.

Once the laptop HDD gets a bit full, I delete any media files from the laptop I don't need quick access to, my music collection will always be on my laptop, other media isn't necessary to have quick access to, but these files will still be on the cloud encrypted with the rest of the files and external, but not encrypted there, so they can be used with as plug and play USB media.

This would mean I would have the following amount of backups:

Personal files (laptop, cloud, external)
Music (laptop, cloud, external)
Other media (cloud, external)

I'm also a big fan of Google's eco system and find Google Photos invaluable. I think I'll be hosting all my photos here from now on and am also considering using Google docs and drive to manage and store all my documents. Would these files also be backed up to Crashplan so it could result in:

Phone data and info (phone, Google)
Personal files (laptop, cloud, external PLUS docs and photos on Google)
Music (laptop, cloud, external)
Other media (cloud, external).


I hope this makes sense and I hope it sounds like a fail safe solution as I want to minimise the amount of hardware I'm reliant on and even dropping from 2 externals to 1 would be great!


If anyone has any feedback on the above, it would be brilliant

BigEejit

Backblaze use their own design of storage hardware (called pods). They also use consumer grade bought off the market in large quantities. The recently bought a bunch of enterprise hard drives from seagate that are showing worse reliability than consumer disks!

Their reliability stats are published, you can but these disks yourself so if you need onsite storage use hgst 4TB disks.

ED E

Its worth noting those pods are very much worst case.

cormie

Thanks folks, I decided to start my own thread here: http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2057752674

After looking into it more with Crashplan support etc, seems they can offer me what I'm after so I'm in the process now of preparing to go with them