Community Newsletter: Q&A: External hard-drive buying advice and backing up data
- 8/8/08 10:24 AM
External Drives Make GREAT BACKUPS!
by Flatworm - 8/2/08 1:20 AM In reply to: External Hard Drives are not the best backup! by MarkFlax
It is outrageously unlikely that an external hard drive used exclusively as a backup would fail AT THE SAME TIME that the primary drive fails. The highly laborious step of putting your data onto optical media, and the recurring expense of purchasing new media when you wish to backup newer data, is such a greater impediment to maintaining current backups that the risk of data loss is significantly greater than with the use of an external drive for backup.
One thing about backup is that it simply isn't done when it is overly labor intensive. I LOVE external drives for their ease of use and the way that they can be frequently and automatically synced with your main operational data storage.
Yes, hard drives do fail. But they only VERY seldom fail except one at a time, and if an event occurs that causes multiple failures simultaneously then you may have a much larger problem than restoration of your data, like New Orleans during Katrina.
YES THEY ARE IF WELL ORGANIZED!
by Max4500 - 8/2/08 1:33 AM In reply to: External Hard Drives are not the best backup! by MarkFlax
How my backup is organized and why is the best backup system.
I have 3 external Hitachi 120GB BACKUP drives.
I have 4 backup procedure and batch files:
1. Daily Backup
2. Weekly Backup
3. Monthly Backup
4. Yearly Backup
1 external drive is located at my wife's office. That is for disaster recovery just in case my home burns or a thief still everything. This drive is used to backup all My Documents once a month and immediately sent back to the remote location.
The 2 external drive at my home are located in different rooms. I use drive A for one week and then drive B for next week and so forth. That helps just in case a powerful viruse wipe out everything.
For the Daily/Weekly/Monthly backup I use batch files based on the XCOPY command which copy all modified files.
Once a month/year I backup all folders.
I do not use any backup software as in the past I got trouble when restoring data due to a corrupted file.
IMPORTANT: I keep three versions Daily/Weekly/Monthly/Yearly in order to avoid to overwrite data and be able to get files which I might have cancelled intentionally. When I make the backup I create a folder whose name has a YYMMDD sintax so 080531 for instance.
As the volume of my data is preatty high backup all my files using CD or DVD is basically impossible.
I have also experienced issues across time accessing data on CD/DVD from one computer to another. NEVER with external drives.
I build external drives choosing the most reliable HD and external boxes.
The Daily backup takes me about 2 minutes. All the procedures has been optimized in order to guarantee safety and speed execution.
There are many other details, anyway what above are the most important.
Life is too short to spend lot of time in front of a pc however backup correctly data is COMPULSORY. Experiencing the LOST of ALL data might be a very drammatic experience such as a home wiped out by a earthquake. On my drives is stored over 20 years of work, knowledge and experience plus all pictures of my family and many memories.
Hope my comments helps.
Massimo
Why Mark is so right.
by rfriendship - 8/2/08 3:55 AM In reply to: External Hard Drives are not the best backup! by MarkFlax
At face value it seems like the way to go, especially if you like to be surrounded by PC paraphanalia, hard drive enclosures gently wirring away, lights flashing etc, and I guess I'm into that too. But the truth is, just like Humans, anything can and will go wrong. My experience: for my notebook i have a WD Passport, which is now 3 or 4 years old and I keep My Documents on it and I back the folder up truthfully, once a month or so which is not good, but I use Acronis and run the archive thru another PC onto a dual layer dvd. (I always keep My Docs on a different drive. Just my habit.)
But referring to the main topic, this is what happened to me. I replaced the two drives in my 5 year old PC and bought a couple of (Dabs) value drive enclosures. I already bought 2 in January and so purchased two more just recently. The two old drives I fitted to the new enclosures, intending to use the larger 500Gb for the Acronis tib bakups. They worked ok to start with (like once) but then I connected them via a powered extenal 4 port USB hub and when I switched the drives on "BOOM" both cards on the enclosures burned out and, yes, of course, the two drives were Kaput. Fortunately I hadn't had the chance to store anything much on them.
This is not a reflection on Dabs' components, I think Dabs are great. But just be very carefull about it all. Soon the solid state drives will become much bigger and I 'spose that will bring a new set of problems. Hopefully not! Best wishes to you all.
Cheers, Bob Friendship.
There is NO backup method/media that works ALWAYS
by CEGublerSr - 8/2/08 4:18 AM In reply to: External Hard Drives are not the best backup! by MarkFlax
If you have data on your computer system (no matter how it's configured or brand) that you ABSOLUTELY CANNOT LOOSE, you have a big problem from the get go. No approach will be 100% effective for 100% of the time, except maybe one that will get you close is ... a printout on physical paper and stored in a bank's safety deposit box. !!
The recommendation of CD/DVD is at best a fools game. First of all, if you use the RW variety, it will be useless somewhere between 5 minutes to 2 years after it is burned. That is the simple truth ... and it's affected adversely by brand, temperature and especially the physical orientation of the storage location (they need to be stored vertically ... end of subject). This caveat applies to the non-rewritable media as well, the only real difference is that you can expect a little longer lifespan ... but not much. The rest of this fools game, goes something like this ... most optical media have a bad habit of not being readable in any drive other than the one to burn the disk (commercial pre-recorded media excepted ... this is truly a viable long lifespan form of disk ... actual recorded/pressed -yes pressed like the old LP records, on a metalization layer sandwiched between two plastic disks that is nearly indestructible as long as the two plastic disks are mechanially ok). Unfortunately, the media we can BURN on our PC is NOT made that way. The burnable surface is a thin layer of organic material sandwiched between to plastic disks, and you really do burn the material when you record the data to them. This last process is always risky, simply because of all the things that can happen to that organic layer to render it unusable.
I used to think CD/DVD backups were the best choice for important backups. HOWEVER, I've been bitten in the butt more times than I care to admit to, where the backup let me down when I needed it most.
Actually external hard disks can be successfully recovered in many cases by sending the drive to one of the companies that specialize in getting your data off the damaged/failed drive. I've used these services often at work, their track record is actually very good ... they all have a bunch of propriety tricks and special hardware that the rest of cannot afford. The catch here is that these special services cost a mint, at work we have a contract with a national firm that does these services (the company I work for has over 100,000 employees world wide) so our price per unit ends up being between $400 and $600 per recovery. Expensive, but if you can't afford to loose the data, it may not be that hi handed after all!
Myself, I have nothing that I absolutely cannot afford to loose, so my backups are inexpensive compared to most, and easy to do. I have two external hard disks, both of which spend most of their life in my closet. I take the #2 drive out and hook it up to my system on Saturdays and do an incremental backup (just the files that have changed or are new since the last backup) of my whole system. Then on the first of each month, I take out the #1 drive hook it up to my system and do a full system backup --everything--.
This way the drive's are at a low risk of failing because most of the time both are in the closet, and no matter what happens on my system, the worst case scenario is that I loose the "last week" of my exploits. Then comes my failsafe ace-in-the-hole, I have an extra drive, #3 (internal in my case.. but it really doesn't matter) that has only one large partition and is reserved EXCLUSIVELY for the sole use by one specific program ... TimeMachine. This is Apple's answer to anyone's backup needs, it's free and comes with OS-X Leopard, it's foolproof, it doesn't make mistakes (that I can find), and it makes a backup every hour in the background so that I'm not aware its even happening (very very low resource requirements) ... with this, my worst case loss is 1 hour of work. And if it dose mess up, I have the main backups in the closet where they've been waiting for the day I needed them the worst. 
So far, in the last 90 days I've pulled a major OPPS 5 different times, and TimeMachine has rescued me every time without a hitch!!
2 Exterrnal HD
by dratner - 8/2/08 5:31 AM In reply to: External Hard Drives are not the best backup! by MarkFlax
I use 2 external HD's. I backup the smaller to the larger on a periodic basis. Using DVD's is not an option for me as the amount of data is too large.
Do NOT Depend On CD/DVD only - Either!
by UITD - 8/2/08 6:32 AM In reply to: External Hard Drives are not the best backup! by MarkFlax
MarkFlax,
I backed up to a CD/DVD (DVD in my case) and I can not read my backup data at all. I get these CRC errors and no matter what DVD drive I have tried, they all throw the same error.
Best solution for backup is TAPE. Sure, it costs more but then you get what you pay for.
Backups using CD or DVD
by frankgravante - 8/2/08 6:42 AM In reply to: External Hard Drives are not the best backup! by MarkFlax
Dose data stored on a writable CD or DVD have a shelf life? I heard that these writeable "R" discs only last for a couple years. While the Symantec Back Up Exec program is a pain, we use tape back up on our server, doing differentials every other night till it requires more than one tape to complete, then doing a full back up and starting the differential back up process over again. We use two sets of full back up tapes, rotating one off premise and the other on premise, and store all tapes in both premises in fire safes. We also use RAID 5 on the server. That covers it all I beleive?
Hard drive backup not perfect but very, very reliable!
by Rohn12345 - 8/2/08 7:30 AM In reply to: External Hard Drives are not the best backup! by MarkFlax
Hi:
I agree with your comments on the hard drive, this is just common sense that it will fail at some point. However disks also get lost and get cracked so we are not looking for the perfect solution because there is none. USB hard drive backup is the best way for the average person to go if they are aware of your comments, that a Hard drive will fail. In most cases though my experience is people have no backup. My advice is get the crucial data you can not lose off the system drive period, do a main DVD backup if possible and have that USB hard drive backup which can easily be kept up to date. They are cheap, easy to use and very reliable these days. My experience has always been positive when using a hard drive to back up my entire system. Has saved me hundreds of lost hours!
Rohn
How does this go down with the experts
by dougg0 - 8/2/08 11:02 AM In reply to: External Hard Drives are not the best backup! by MarkFlax
My PC has 3 HDDs. 1st is the system disc where I keep NO user data. 2nd and 3rd are a RAID 1 mirror. I have moved "My documents", Itunes store, email store etc to the RAID. On top of that I use Robocopy to back up the whole of the D Drive to 2 USB 500GB discs. A question to DVD lovers is "how do you keep 150GB of data backed up to DVD or CD?"
Happy secure data days to you all. Remember your data is what you use. The system disc can aways be rebuilt; I use Ghost for that when installing new software.
External Hard Drives are not the best backup!
by rsctp - 8/2/08 11:17 AM In reply to: External Hard Drives are not the best backup! by MarkFlax
I have an iMac with OS X 10.4.11 and two Maxcor external HDs. I use freeware SuperDuper to copy my HD alternating between the External drive. This give me a current and a back level copy of my internal HD. Either of the back up copies can be selected as a Boot Drive at Start up and function thereafter the same as my internal drive until I re select the internal drive to be my HD. As a result in the event of a main HD failure or other problem affecting my computer I can simply select a different drive as my internal drive, replace or restore the bad drive. I'm back on line in the time it takes to re boo.t I can then "copy the current drive over to new drive or restore the internal drive to the back up level and I back to having the drive protection I wanted.
Forget the disk. Use Offsite storage
by jequeen1 - 8/2/08 1:19 PM In reply to: External Hard Drives are not the best backup! by MarkFlax
For $120/year, I have an 8 TB quota from a company who provides SW services to small businesses.
Secure,Private Offsite backup is one of their services.
I use a very inexpensive tool called Goodsync which every two weeks automatically logs on and compares my disk contents (it excludes Operating System files for obvioous reasons) against my disk backup on the 'service' company's system and makes sure they are in sync.
It does this over the internet and is reasonably quick becuase it uses UDP. I have the 20/6 service from Verizon FIOS
The first Sync takes a long time obviously because your are starting with a blank slate.
Since their business is protecting customer's data , The company I use has their own offsite backup system so my data is doubly safe.
There are quite a few companies like this,BTW.
My PC has all my digital photos on it.financial data,tax returns,medical records,legal documents,scanned copies of such things like my car titles,etc,etc.
I must admit that I do have Goodsync setup to also synch my data to a pair of external Disk's every other might
Ask yourself this "If my House burned down tonight, how much trouble would I be in?"
Backing Up-Data on External USB Hard Drives -Lessons Learned
by manishrkale2002 - 8/3/08 6:57 AM In reply to: External Hard Drives are not the best backup! by MarkFlax
I complepletely agree with Mark's advises below; External HDDs are not the best back-up means. I have used three of them till date ( all various makes) and two of them had crashed. Needeless to say they were my primary back-up mechanism, and I have since changed that approach.(DVD Of Important Files). I spent substantial $$ and time to have (some of )the failed USB HDD data recovered.
As well, in line with T.J. Bears advise above, 3 HDDs later, I am able to stand by T.J. Bears and say the same: Seagate. End of Search.
Thanks.
Manish
External Hard Drives are not the best backup!
by ladydw41 - 8/3/08 12:16 PM In reply to: External Hard Drives are not the best backup! by MarkFlax
Hi I bought an external hard drive because a DVD did not have the room. If external hard drives are not the best back-up, what does one do with too much data for a DVD?
Davilon
On-line adds safety
by mrslimpy - 8/3/08 2:27 PM In reply to: External Hard Drives are not the best backup! by MarkFlax
Besides the external hard drives, and CD/DVD backups (which are a real PIA), I have found that on-line backup services to be extremely inexpensive, safe and reliable. Regardless, for my office, we use a standalone HP pc on a peer to peer network that has a RAID array for data backup. In addition, the pc has its own removable, portable media drive. I use smartsyncpro software to do real time backups to the portable media drive. We also have sugarsync to do on line backups, in real time. Finally, I run backupmypc to a separate networked pc. I used to use a Mirra network drive to do backups, but it really slowed the server down. I think smartsync pro works better than mirra.
While you may perceive this as overkill, I will note that two out of three backup systems failed to work properlty at a time when our server crashed. While we lost one day of data, we were back in business within three days (most of that time was waiting for the server to come back from the shop).
I don't disagree that CD/DVD's are good for backing up data, but they are the most cumbersome and unreliable because they require manual intervention. The human factor in doing consistent backups is the weak link. If the data is REALLY important (like your business depends upon it), there should be several backups methods/systems, not just one.
Diversity
by wvbailey - 8/3/08 4:35 PM In reply to: On-line adds safety by mrslimpyI agree. Diversify. For the most important files, use a MIX of different media -- hard-drive, solid-state drive, DVD, even paper as a last resort -- when in doubt, type it out.
There's at least one (hardware) international standard (IEC/ISO) re this issue (sorry, can't remember the number) that enccourages both replication of function (i.e. 3 microcomputers with majority vote, or numerous hard drives with majority-voting) as well as "diversity" (a totally different mechanism) -- and ALL must agree. This is how the US Space Shuttle manages its soft-/hard-ware. My experience has been that diversity, right down to the printed word, is the most reliable.
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