External HD Backup

[marnold]

Does anyone here use an external harddrive for backing up your computer? The local Best Buy has a couple on sale. I want to back up my main box and my PS3. The problem I'm having is that most of the reviews are nothing but horror stories of drive failures.

[Spudman]

I use a Thermaltake BlacX. They are USB connected and it takes just seconds to pop in or out any drive you want. With drive prices so low I went this way because I can have one drive for music, one for recording, one for photos...you get my drift. A 1TB drive is now under $100 and that makes the 500 and 600 GB drives really cheap. The BlacX was around $25.

http://www.thermaltakeusa.com/Product.aspx?S=1268&ID=1642

http://techgage.com/reviews/thermaltake/blacx/blacx_1.jpg

[Eric]

I do use an external hard drive, but I don't think my situation would help you at all. I keep all data on a 160 GB Verbatim Smartdisk Crossfire that I bought because it was cheap. It stays on pretty much all of the time and acts as my primary data drive. It's not backed up. I think this is probably a bad practice, so you can safely ignore me. However, I do want to see what others say.

[Robert]

I use Fantom drives. 2 TB and they are inexpensive and they support the fast E-sata interface. I'm a happy man.

[pictoratus]

I use a SimpleTech external 500GB USB drive made by Hitachi for backup.

I like the idea of the Thermaltake BlacX Spudman is using; easy to swap out drives and extra handy if a drive happens to fail. That way you don't lose the whole unit which would be the case if my SimpleTech drive went out.

[marnold]

I use a Thermaltake BlacX. They are USB connected and it takes just seconds to pop in or out any drive you want. With drive prices so low I went this way because I can have one drive for music, one for recording, one for photos...you get my drift. A 1TB drive is now under $100 and that makes the 500 and 600 GB drives really cheap. The BlacX was around $25.
I ended up getting the USB/eSATA version at BB along with a WD "Green" 1TB drive. I backed up my PS3 (which took an eternity) and thus far I've backed up my mp3s and pictures. It works pretty well, except for some reason I can't get it to work with the eSATA port on my computer. I'm going to take it back and get the newer USB 3.0 version since my box just happens to have those speedy little ports a-waiting for me. The backups from my computer didn't take long as it is. The USB 3.0 version should at least double the throughput. These BlacXs have a really slick design. The interface is solid and the drive sticking in the air basically makes overheating impossible.

FWIW I'm using luckyBackup on my Linux box which is basically an rsync front-end. When I get things the way I want them, I'm going to add the raw rsync commands to cron.weekly so that the backup will be updated on a weekly basis.

[Spudman]

A backup sure does give good peace of mind eh?

[Tig]

I use USB external drives for music and video I play at work, but not for backup. I don't need my backup to be portable.
I bought a SATA internal 500GB drive on sale at Sweetwater for just $39 bucks, which is where I back up data to. SATA is much faster than USB.

[marnold]

I use USB external drives for music and video I play at work, but not for backup. I don't need my backup to be portable.
Portability really isn't my concern either (at least not the primary one). My problem is that the amount of stuff that I have to back up between my MP3s, pictures, and /home directory make it impractical to downright impossible to put it all on DVDs. I went external for several of reasons:
1) I can back up both the PS3 and my main box (this is the big one)
2) I can put the external drive off-site easily
3) Another internal hard drive means more heat inside the box. That's not a HUGE issue since my box runs quite cool.

Basically I'm going to use the hard drive to back up my computer weekly. I'll burn DVDs probably quarterly of the most important stuff to put in the safe deposit box.


I bought a SATA internal 500GB drive on sale at Sweetwater for just $39 bucks, which is where I back up data to. SATA is much faster than USB.
Actually, not anymore. SATA rev. 2 is faster than USB 2.0 by a lot (3Gbps vs. 480 Mbps), but USB 3.0's theoretical max of 5Gbps is only slightly slower than SATA rev. 3's 6Gbps. Obviously in both cases that speed is theoretical and not easily achieved. No current regular hard drive can even come close to using that amount of bandwidth. Even most solid state drives can't. That's why I got the mobo I did last year that supports both USB 3 and SATA rev. 3. Even though I wasn't using it at the time, I knew that one day I would. That day has come.

[Beerman]

I have a couple and prefer eSATA if I can get it. It's definitely faster but with USB 3 making it's way out, some new externals are already offering that.
What I've done in the last 2 computers I've built is to by some eSATA 'rack' drives. They fit in the 5" bays and have small fans on the back to keep them cooler and connect to the eSATA ports on the motherboard. They can be key locked so someone doesn't open them by accident but you can pop drives in and out to make backups, etc.
My last pc I built has a slide in eSATA port on the top so that all I have to do is slide a silly cover off and put the hard drive in the slot and copy away.
There's no reason to not backup. Hard drives are ridiculously cheap.

[mapka]

I just bought a Western Digital 500GB My Passport Elite. So far so good! I needed to get the music, movies, and pictures off of three computers and it did this task no problem. Came with software. Once you run it (yes it takes some time cuz USB 2), every time after it will only download the newest files from your computer. Fairly fast unless you are loading Gigs of data every week! Only bad point is the software will not save system files.

[Beerman]

500GB almost doesn't go far enough these days. Especially if you use wav and flac files.
If you want an OS/system backup, look into Acronis True Image Home. It'll make an image of your hard disk and if allow you to add that image back in minutes to an hour. When I first install my OS, I add all the drivers and windows updates and make a fresh image. If I ever have to start over, I simply format my drive, boot with the boot disc and install the image I made back on in minutes. Works a treat even though W7 doesn't take too long to install.

[stingx]

I use an 8 TB NAS solution. All devices in my home benefit.

[deeaa]

I've been really pining for a proper NAS for a good while now. I have a few terabytes of drives in my desktop, and a 1TB eSata backup drive for those, and a couple of USB drives, 250, 400, but a proper, big NAS would be great. I'll likely just get a couple of those cheap Buffalo 1TB drives for now. I have this idea that I have some 30-40 homemade DVD's with family videos and 8mm's from since the 60's, and I want to put them all on HD instead, and I'd likely want to have that HD backed up anyway, and I could also use the same drive to storage those films and such I may want to watch again some day.

But it's so diffcult to arrange everything, I'd need to change so much of my home stuff.

I've been thinking by far the easiest and cheapest solution is when I need to upgrade my home networking, and probably my desktop PC at about the same time then...I think what I'll do is I'll build a simple, underclocked and fan-free PC and put it in my electric closet in a box. I will run gigabyte ethernet from it to my TV player and my desktop and a WLAN for other devices.

Then I can just buy a bunch of HD's as big as they come and a hardware RAID card, put them in a RAID 10 formation, and then I can have all the benefits of a NAS with added helpful things, like I can run a Zune etc. video server and access stuff via my Xbox and TV box directly from the server, and need no USB drives for the video player, etc. etc. and there will likely be enough space there to backup my desktop too.

But, we'll see...maybe I'm too lazy to build it.