The Big Backup

[2Channelwonder]

Totally separate from my new build, I have at the last count after finding my lost Windows 10 key, nine mechanical drives to back up ranging from two old EIDEs and the rest are SATA, the larger of the ancient drives is 200Gigs though so I kept it around for backup purposes (in the era before USB flash drives that is) and I managed to find an EIDE to SATA circuit board converter off Amazon so I can plug it into a motherboard. Maplin also sold an internal SATA drive docking station that was USB 2.0 so I can at least view what's on them and run a quick format to get rid of old Windows installs but that leaves all the pix/music/etc to store.

Anyone here running a Western Digital freestanding Passport backup drive that's one of the external 2TB models? I want something that will take everything relevant off all nine of these drives and just be the one place for a historical backup and that's it, once the new PC's built. Or would an internal 2TB WD Blue or even Green be better than an external? Are they still charging a USB 3.0 premium and has anyone had an external die on them? Thankfully I've only had two internals die on me in the past couple of years otherwise it would've been 11 drives to comb through.

All views welcome I really need to catch this up but as long as the drives are kept in a warm room they will survive winter and I can plan for Easter weekend to sit there doing all the copying.

[Pew-Pew]

Why do you have so many drives? Are they all small capacity drives?

I use an external 2 TB seagate 'passport' drive. It's fine. The transfer speeds aren't particularly great, but it's OK for the occasional backup. I think your best bet is to just have a good size internal HDD backup and one decently sized external HDD as another backup, in case your PC sets itself on fire or something. It's 2021, so I would have an SSD as your main Windows drive.

[Drarok]

Don't forget that local backups are useless in case of fire, theft, flood, electrical fuck-ups, etc, etc. You should also consider an off-site backup.

I use Backblaze (referral link for a free month each if someone signs up) for my personal stuff, seems to work well. I've also got my parents set up with the same and it's given me almost zero trouble over the years. I had to reinstall it last time I went round for reasons unknown. Got itself stuck after the subscription lapsed for a few days or something. That's literally the only problem I've had though.

Backups that are manual are unlikely to be up-to-date, so something that sits in the background and saves stuff automatically is awesome.

External drives are just internal drives in a plastic box with an IDE or SATA to USB interface. They'll probably fail at a slightly higher rate than "internals" do due to airflow alone.

3-2-1 backup strategy: if something is important, be sure to have at least 3 copies, on 2 different devices, with at least 1 off-site.

[2Channelwonder]

Why do you have so many drives? Are they all small capacity drives?

I use an external 2 TB seagate 'passport' drive. It's fine. The transfer speeds aren't particularly great, but it's OK for the occasional backup. I think your best bet is to just have a good size internal HDD backup and one decently sized external HDD as another backup, in case your PC sets itself on fire or something. It's 2021, so I would have an SSD as your main Windows drive.

The drive I ripped out today was the last working old one, only 250GB but it was 12 years old - it was still faster to copy from than a drive 4 times larger but the latter was the one that was damaged so at the end of the day, am I right in thinking that you are still bottlenecked by upload speed when using Backblaze, Dropbox or any other cloud-based backup service? Because there's a ton of video files there to back up and they are definitely the reason the damaged drive was full up to half the whole terabyte. If so I'd have to separate everything video related before signing up.

[Pew-Pew]

Yep, any cloud backup service is going to be limited by your upload speed. You have to get the files to them!

Like I said before, just get a decent 2 TB HDD and an SSD (512 GB or 1 TB?) for your boot drive. Even a SATA one would be a big upgrade.

[2Channelwonder]

Sounds good Pew, then in two years time if I feel like adding a fifth layer of backup to the three speeds of drive and the cloud, then I can just see those 60 quid Blu Ray burners dropping to the price DVD models were five years ago, 25 quid retail is fair but the price crash won't happen before 2023 when patents and royalties expire on Blu Ray. Not that I'll need one right away the SSD and USB sticks have just swanned in and taken over that casual major backup market, if there are USB sticks that can hold more than a single layer Blu Ray no-one except a video editor's spending 60 quid on a BD Burner right now.

Later on when both the drives and the media crash in price though, wouldn't be anything wrong with something optical for backup and again if you have a large CD collection you still play them through the PC or at least I do, am saving the HDD space not bothering to rip anything anymore unless the music CD gets damaged on the underside and starts to skip. Then it would be a rescue job unless the blanks cost more than an Amazon marketplace replacement.

[Pew-Pew]

You can get USB sticks that are much bigger than blu rays. I have a 128 GB one for example.