I'm looking for the same thing. But when you can get a TERAbyte of storage for about a hundred bucks, just get two and backup to both. If you want reliability - or should I say data protection, then you might think about a Raid 1 system (mirrored drives in a single enclosure.) Hard drives are a commodity, they're a mature technology product and personally I would just shop for price and software features (if any.)
Sorry I don't have any brand names to recommend, which I think is the meat of your quesiton...
Hi Ben and Lon,
I have two Western Digital "My Book" USB drives. Just recently I purchased the second drive to be able to have double backup of my images: One is the 1TByte "home edition" the other one is the 750GB "home edition". The 1Tbyte is working flawlessly since 6 months. I think this is a safe solution now, but I strongly recommend to have two drives or to buy some drive that has two drives build into one enclosure (like Lon mentions)
Before that I had a Seagate drive and it was dead after 1 month. I am not saying Seagate is the less good product, but I simply did not want to buy a Seagate again and made the much more positive experience with WD. There's also a version that has that Raid 1capability.
I am sure there are other good brands too.
Dietrich
Western Digital is fairly reliable. Their "My Book" comes in sizes from 384MB to 1GB. Decent speed, durable case, USB and Firewire connections and pretty good price.
I always use the lacie 500gb external hd's. I buy them in pairs of 2 (so one is backup of the other)
so far i have 8 of those and they all work flawlessly !
All hard drives are subject to failure. With that said, Lon's suggestion to double up on the internal hard drives using RAID 1 together with an external, ensures that you have data stored on three physical hard drives. I would take this one step further and subscribe to a carbonite account which will allow you to upload an unlimited amount of data for less than $60/yr. You can automate the backups with a simple free program like SynchbackSE. When I was an IT consultant I used to scare stubborn people into purchasing tape back units and RAID arrays by telling them that there are two kinds of computer users - those that have lost critical data due to hard drive mishaps, and those that will - and I would ask them which kind of computer user they wished to be, as I removed a purchase order form and pen from my bag. Worked both ways. They either bought into my suggestion right then and there, or at some point in the future, after a catastrophe.
Well, I am not at all an IT-guy, but yes I can confirm hardrives fail for what my opinion is worth. As mentioned it happend to me a few times already (once for the external USB-drive,first one I purchased). And to most people I talked to.
I just purchased the WD My Book 1 TB Essential Edition. Just hooked up and decided to try the 30 day free trial offer of Memeo AutoBackup to run continuous backup. My only concern is leaving the hard drive hooked up & running at all times.
Posted by Steve Sieren on June 9, 2009 at 11:24 AM
I use WD, seagate and lacie. They can always be updated with new drivers as time goes by. I have another off brand that just isn't campatable with vista and is just sitting there without access.
Long term campatibility is something to think about. 1TB is worth the price and fills up quickly which you should take into consideration since last time I talked to you, you mention a body upgrade.
Posted by Steve Sieren on June 9, 2009 at 11:27 AM
Sometimes you can tell when they're about to go out. They will make an odd clicking noise. They might still work at that time just know to get your datat off there ASAP.
If you leave them on all the time 2 years seems to be pushing it for reliability. I would turn them off.
Look for MTBF ratings, (mean time between failure)
The higher the better.
I prefer firewire 800 7200 rpm 32mb Cache.
Parity is best. (redundancy)
A cheap and fast way to go is to look at 2 my book studio editions running raid 0 at 1-2gb a piece.
I manually backup to the second drive weekly or so. Also, the second drive I do not keep power too when not in use, ie, only powered up during the backup process. Heat and usage kill the drive. Keep that second drive in a safe place. If you need more space, add in pairs. Look at green drives for energy savings (WD Caviar). Also, in a year or two when drives become cheaper, you can always swap out a drive that is bigger, or, take that drive out of the case, and add it to a bigger case. Some manufactures have cases that can hold 8 3.5" HD's. There's always a solution for the future.
Side Note:
I also have a flattened 8bit Jpeg at 10 (5mb-20mb) full size image of each and every one of my masters uploaded to flickr. (non accessible to everyone excluding myself) Great cheap ($25yr) backup, and a nice place to have them incase you need them for something.
I don't know about which brand is better but like everyone said, having at least 2 back up drives would be the best solution. I would definitely recommend 2 slightly cheaper drives over one expensive drive (I'm not saying the cheapest you can get but you can get reasonable brand name drives for pretty cheap). If that one expensive drive fails(which they still can) then you have lost everything. If you buy 2 slighty cheaper drives the chances of both of them going bad at the same time are very small (unless you don't use a surge protector). You can get external hard drives for really cheap on newegg.com. They have a 1TB western digital for $109.
There was a Seagate advisory about certain 1 TB drives that had an abnormally high failure rate. Google "seagate 1tb failure" to check it out.
I have a Seagate Freeagent .5 TB that is giving me problems with having a program write .wav and .mpg files to it. The directories were hashed and I couldn't recover the files. If I dragged and dropped it worked fine but now I don't trust it.
Of course, hard drives are mechanical devices, so they will fail. So will solid-state devices (ask my old motherboard - no, don't bother, no reply). The obvious, but tedious, solution is to back up frequently and redundantly often and over and over again to a portable medium that will last, such as a floppy disk, no, a zip drive, no a CD, no a DVD, nah, DVD-dl, - oh heck. We're doomed and so is our data.
I have had 3 externals fail. One Iomega and 2 Maxtor. The first time I paid $500.00 to fwr my photos bac. The next 2 times, I just cried.
I highly recommend using the online storage at Carbonite. It's cheap, reliable, and it works!
I had a direct lightening strike a few months ago. I had to replace my computer (fried). I was really scared that carbonite wouldn't work....but it DID!! I got ALL of my photos back. It took a week to download them....there were quite a few. But every one was just as I had saved it!
Forget externals.....they ALWAYS fail, and it costs an arm and a leg to retrieve the photos professionally....if they are retrievable at all!
I've had two WD externals fail, one about a year after purchase and one about a month after. I've been using Iomega drives for the past 6 months without any problems. I backup to two external drives and CD's.
It's too bad we can't do polls on here. It would be interesting to see how many folks depend on:
(1) their internal drive,
(2) an external drive,
(3) archival quality CD/DVD's stored offsite,
(4) online storage sites.
Personally I like the idea of using the internal drive for work space, an external for immediate duplicates/backups, and archival DVDs for longer term backups. I haven't even looked at the online storage sites but that would seem to be a good alternative to archival media but as Lucy points out downloading a bunch of lost files could be a negative.
Benjamin--hmm, that's not what I've read based on NIST findings. Here's a synopsis:
Digital Data Preservation
This article provides some guidelines for the preservation of digital data using CDs and DVDs. This information has been gathered from a number of sources including NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), DVD and CD manufacturers and data archiving specialists.
The consensus of opinions, based on accelerated lifetime testing, is that a high quality CD or DVD, if properly handled and stored, should preserved data for at least 75 years. Some studies even suggest a lifetime as long as 200 years before the data becomes unreadable.
Of course whether the hardware required to read a current CD or DVD will be around in 75 or 200 years is another matter. Most system today don't have even the hardware to read 5.25" floppy disks (which were common and popular only 10 years ago).
The key points here are that long life depends on using HIGH QUALITY archival DVDs and CDs and handling and storing them properly. The less you handle them, the better, so for real archival use, make two copies. Put one away in storage under the conditions outlined below (vertical storage in a case under low temperature and low humidity conditions) and use one as your "working" copy.
Here's a link to an NIST study:http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/894.05/docs/StabilityStudy.pdf
The important conclusion in a nutshell: "It is demonstrated here that CD-R and DVD-R media
can be very stable (sample S4 for CD-R and sample D2 for DVD-R). Results suggest that these media types will ensure data is available for several tens of years and therefore may be suitable for archival uses."
Personally I think that 75-200 years will be long enough for me--Larry
Discussion
20 repliesI'm looking for the same thing. But when you can get a TERAbyte of storage for about a hundred bucks, just get two and backup to both. If you want reliability - or should I say data protection, then you might think about a Raid 1 system (mirrored drives in a single enclosure.) Hard drives are a commodity, they're a mature technology product and personally I would just shop for price and software features (if any.)
Sorry I don't have any brand names to recommend, which I think is the meat of your quesiton...
Lon
I have two Western Digital "My Book" USB drives. Just recently I purchased the second drive to be able to have double backup of my images: One is the 1TByte "home edition" the other one is the 750GB "home edition". The 1Tbyte is working flawlessly since 6 months. I think this is a safe solution now, but I strongly recommend to have two drives or to buy some drive that has two drives build into one enclosure (like Lon mentions)
Before that I had a Seagate drive and it was dead after 1 month. I am not saying Seagate is the less good product, but I simply did not want to buy a Seagate again and made the much more positive experience with WD. There's also a version that has that Raid 1capability.
I am sure there are other good brands too.
Dietrich
http://macperformanceguide.com/Mac-RecommendedEnclosures.html
so far i have 8 of those and they all work flawlessly !
Wim
Long term campatibility is something to think about. 1TB is worth the price and fills up quickly which you should take into consideration since last time I talked to you, you mention a body upgrade.
If you leave them on all the time 2 years seems to be pushing it for reliability. I would turn them off.
The higher the better.
I prefer firewire 800 7200 rpm 32mb Cache.
Parity is best. (redundancy)
A cheap and fast way to go is to look at 2 my book studio editions running raid 0 at 1-2gb a piece.
I manually backup to the second drive weekly or so. Also, the second drive I do not keep power too when not in use, ie, only powered up during the backup process. Heat and usage kill the drive. Keep that second drive in a safe place. If you need more space, add in pairs. Look at green drives for energy savings (WD Caviar). Also, in a year or two when drives become cheaper, you can always swap out a drive that is bigger, or, take that drive out of the case, and add it to a bigger case. Some manufactures have cases that can hold 8 3.5" HD's. There's always a solution for the future.
Side Note:
I also have a flattened 8bit Jpeg at 10 (5mb-20mb) full size image of each and every one of my masters uploaded to flickr. (non accessible to everyone excluding myself) Great cheap ($25yr) backup, and a nice place to have them incase you need them for something.
I have a Seagate Freeagent .5 TB that is giving me problems with having a program write .wav and .mpg files to it. The directories were hashed and I couldn't recover the files. If I dragged and dropped it worked fine but now I don't trust it.
Pete D. feeling particularly doomed this week...
I highly recommend using the online storage at Carbonite. It's cheap, reliable, and it works!
I had a direct lightening strike a few months ago. I had to replace my computer (fried). I was really scared that carbonite wouldn't work....but it DID!! I got ALL of my photos back. It took a week to download them....there were quite a few. But every one was just as I had saved it!
Forget externals.....they ALWAYS fail, and it costs an arm and a leg to retrieve the photos professionally....if they are retrievable at all!
Lucy
(1) their internal drive,
(2) an external drive,
(3) archival quality CD/DVD's stored offsite,
(4) online storage sites.
Personally I like the idea of using the internal drive for work space, an external for immediate duplicates/backups, and archival DVDs for longer term backups. I haven't even looked at the online storage sites but that would seem to be a good alternative to archival media but as Lucy points out downloading a bunch of lost files could be a negative.
Larry
Archival CD/DVDs?
http://www.pcworld.com/article/124312/do_burned_cds_have_a_short_life_span.html
Digital Data Preservation
This article provides some guidelines for the preservation of digital data using CDs and DVDs. This information has been gathered from a number of sources including NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), DVD and CD manufacturers and data archiving specialists.
The consensus of opinions, based on accelerated lifetime testing, is that a high quality CD or DVD, if properly handled and stored, should preserved data for at least 75 years. Some studies even suggest a lifetime as long as 200 years before the data becomes unreadable.
Of course whether the hardware required to read a current CD or DVD will be around in 75 or 200 years is another matter. Most system today don't have even the hardware to read 5.25" floppy disks (which were common and popular only 10 years ago).
The key points here are that long life depends on using HIGH QUALITY archival DVDs and CDs and handling and storing them properly. The less you handle them, the better, so for real archival use, make two copies. Put one away in storage under the conditions outlined below (vertical storage in a case under low temperature and low humidity conditions) and use one as your "working" copy.
Here's a link to an NIST study:http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/894.05/docs/StabilityStudy.pdf
The important conclusion in a nutshell: "It is demonstrated here that CD-R and DVD-R media
can be very stable (sample S4 for CD-R and sample D2 for DVD-R). Results suggest that these media types will ensure data is available for several tens of years and therefore may be suitable for archival uses."
Personally I think that 75-200 years will be long enough for me--Larry