Hardware advice for backup solution

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arcon

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#204276 24-Sep-2016 18:28

Hi all - I'm after advice for a full image backup solution for my workstation (onsite is ok for now). There's lots of software to choose from such as Acronis, but what would a reliable external drive be? I'm out of touch with the best HDDs as my workstation is pure SSD.

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#1639979 24-Sep-2016 19:29

Are you looking for an Ethernet-connected NAS box, or a USB3-connected box?

How much data do you want to store?

Does your backup need to be portable?

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arcon

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#1640018 24-Sep-2016 20:18

Hi thanks for your reply - RE connectivity I'm not really sure but my workstation has GbE and USB3.1... portability is not really essential... at least not as important as having a reliable drive.

The amount of data is not huge, initially only half a TB, might vary by a few GB each day but is not likely to go over 2TB for a couple years lol.

timmmay

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#1640021 24-Sep-2016 20:34

Macrium Reflect Free. No hard drive is reliable, neither is any SSD, so have multiple copies in multiple locations. If you upload your images to Amazon S3 THAT is reliable - 99.9999999% (from memory). 30GB on S3 infrequently accessed storage costs US$0.38c/month. My image files are about 15GB because I keep rubbish off that drive/partition.

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#1640024 24-Sep-2016 20:49

arcon:

Hi thanks for your reply - RE connectivity I'm not really sure but my workstation has GbE and USB3.1... portability is not really essential... at least not as important as having a reliable drive.

The amount of data is not huge, initially only half a TB, might vary by a few GB each day but is not likely to go over 2TB for a couple years lol.

Even though your storage requirement is small, I would suggest a USB3 box with 4TB of storage - you always underestimate how much stuff you have.

Options are a single drive (cheap and simple) or a matched pair of HDDs in RAID 1 configuration for redundancy (my strong preference).

Happy to recommend enclosures when I know your preference.

I would recommend 4TB Western Digital Red drives (I use 20 of them - they are quiet and reliable.)

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arcon

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#1640029 24-Sep-2016 21:07

I think 1 drive would be fine - if it dies its only a backup & i'll have time to buy another and re-backup.

richms

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#1640031 24-Sep-2016 21:14

arcon:

I think 1 drive would be fine - if it dies its only a backup & i'll have time to buy another and re-backup.

No you wont have time to get another and do another backup. It will die and then you will find the other copy of the stuff has some unreadable files because of disk failure.

Why not just use crashplan and send it to the cloud as well as an external you rotate with another offsite?

Edit: I am meaning to use crashplan to back up the images, it in itself is not a complete imaging solution.

Richard rich.ms

HP

Shop now for HP laptops and other devices (affiliate link).

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#1640040 24-Sep-2016 22:02

If you want a really simple single HDD backup:

Western Digital My Book 4TB USB3.0 External HDD $300 including 4TB HDD

If you want an even simpler, smaller enclosure:

Orico 3.5" External Hard Drive 3.5 inch Enclosure $40

PLUS

Western Digital Red WD40EFRX 4TB 64MB 6Gb/s SATA3 $270

I use both of these enclosures, but I must stress that I don't use them for backup of critical data. If the drive fails, your backed-up data has gone.

(I use multiple RAID arrays for mission-critical data)

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1101

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#1640544 26-Sep-2016 11:23

The options depend on how much you want to spend, and what level of redundancy . It sounds like a single USB HD will be good enough for
what you want.

You could go for two rotated USB HD's , or single USB hard drive (avoid the very smallest USB HD's) > Go for a WD or Seagate Branded USB HD, rather than a
HD in some generic external case .

Or a single drive NAS (these are getting very cheap) , or better a two drive NAS

with any of the many HD options, they need to be disconnected from the PC & disconnected from the power after the backup : malware can go after connected backups, power spikes can destroy HD's still plugged into mains power.

**ALLWAYS do test recovery , dont assume the backup is 100% (even just a few recent files if impracticable to test recover the image to another PC/HD)

TLD

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#1644184 2-Oct-2016 14:55

Going back to the software side of things, the video editing pros I know all use Shadow Protect. It lets you take incremental backups at a user set interval (I use 15 minutes). You can mount the backup at any of those time points. You can also make a boot drive image and a DVD that will boot to that image, so if disaster strikes, you are up and running within five minutes. Another plus point is Storagecraft's customer service which is outstanding. You get one person who is in charge of your case number, and they follow up until you are all fixed. Considering I only paid US$99 for it, that level of service is extraordinary.

I have 30Tb all told which covers three levels of back up for essential data, and two for everything else. I currently have seven USB3 externals, but I have had several WD externals fail. All but one of them was able to be recovered by removing the USB3 interface, and connecting directly to a SATA port. Those drives give me about 120Mb/s continuous.

I now buy Seagate Expansion USB3 externals. None have given me any problems so far, and they give me 180Mb/s continuous. I did notice they were running hot because I had them stacked, but spacing them about 10mm apart curred that.

I'd like to move completely away from mechanical drives because I have had so many failures. I've never had any issues with my SSDs (I have four).

Incidentally, I am looking at a new build at the moment, and discovered those M.2 SSDs that do 2500Mb/s. That's 2.5Gb/s. You need a main board that supports the M.2 socket, or you can get PCIe cards that take them.

Trevor Dennis
Rapaura (near Blenheim)

billgates

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#1644188 2-Oct-2016 15:17

Another vote for ShadowProtect for home and small businesses.

Do whatever you want to do man.