My 3.5", 1 TB Seagate Barracuda drive, that I use as my Time Machine backup drive, failed yesterday. This drive was about 8 years old, so I guess it didn’t owe me anything. The question now is what to replace it with. I don’t really need more than 1 TB, but 2 and 4 TB units are probably cheaper. I have two perfectly good external drive cases, so I’ll just get the bare drive, and put it in one of those.
Any suggestions as to a good reliable brand and model?
What about an SSD? Good or bad idea?
don’t buy today’s first price hard drives… they will even not last till the end of the warranty …
ssd are useless and expensive IMHO for backup device.
pretty sure you will have as many brands as answers here but
I’m found that toshiba enterprise N300 drives last a very long time. none of the dozens I sold came back defective. (and they work 24/24 in NAS heavily used)
also some slower drives made for backup (some 8 TB seagate but I think they are not made anymore)
I have one of these as a backup on my NAS, and I changed the enclosure twice but the drive is still working !
I have multiple USB thumb drives that I keep for backup.
I also have redundant external TB-size drives.
For backup upon backup upon backup… I have a 2TB Google Drive subscription.
I’d do a RAID array with like three 4TB drives in an NAS enclosure.
i use a 4 GB NAS (RAID 2x4)
WD mycloudex2ultra
this NAS can also enable Time Machine backups for mac
for future thay plan hopefully 5 GHz WLAN (wireless)
SSD are fantastique.
I have several 4 TB SSDs to rotate and I use the with Carbon Copy Cloner to have a clone of my computer in case it would get stolen.
For backup, you may use external disk drives with Time Machine. Or better a NAS, which also keeps snapshots. That way, if you delete the backup, you can still access an older one.
I have a Synology NAS with two 4TB drives in RAID.
Automatic Time machine backups and it also serves as a media server with Plex.
I am also considering carbon copy cloner to make a full backup of my machine in case it gets stolen.
SSDs with Time Machine are fantastic, and worth the money.
Remember the 3-2-1 rule: 3 copies of data, stored on 2 different types of storage media, with one copy offsite
To implement the 3-2-1 rule, I do this:
I just bought a 2TB Samsung T7 Shield for my new backup drive, after fighting my WD HDD for an hour trying to get it to mount. I highly recommend the SSD approach. I velcro’d it to the bottom of the desk, it makes no noise, and is fast as hell. Go for it.
Side conversation, the WD situation is really weird. Full detailed test passes. Smart passes. Everything passes. There’s nothing wrong. But I often have a problem where it just won’t mount. No errors, just doesn’t mount. Open disk utility, click mount, nothing. Works fine once mounted, it just doesn’t like mounting. I can’t say I’ve seen something like this before.
What if you try with diskutil from the Terminal?
I don’t get an id to mount it with.
I have Backblaze too. That’s my catastrophic backup. Backblaze is not full system backup, so I’d lose some stuff if I need to rely on it. With Time Machine, I’d lose nothing. So that’s plan A. But if the house were to burn down and I lose all my hardware, that’s where Backblaze comes in. Hopefully, it’ll be a waste of money.
I use Acronis because it doesn’t tell me what I can’t back up.
The fact that I can’t find pricing for their cloud backup means it’s way too expensive. Backblaze is cheap. I don’t need every single byte if I’ve already lost everything in the house. I can setup vms again. I can customize preferences. I can download apps. What I need it for is the stuff I can’t replace, which is mostly the stuff on my NAS and in my documents folder. And yeah, I forgot that I have my NAS backing up to a Wasabi bucket. My PCs back up to my NAS. I’d have my Time Machine backups going to the NAS too, but TM really doesn’t like anything except a local drive, or the discontinued Time Capsule.
Acronis IS more expensive, that is true. But I don’t want to miss anything in the Library and Application folders. There are multiple ways to Rome.
We had a break-in a couple of years ago. We were very lucky because we were at home. The thieves only took the money, my camera and the jewellery of my mother. The Windows laptop I had at that time wasn’t stolen.
Oh, they need to do better with their branding. I didn’t realize True Image included cloud options now. I was originally looking at their cloud pages that said contact us for pricing info. In that case, it is fair to compare to Backblaze.
Fully agree. Even the naming of the product is silly.
you can replace the time capsule with a synology MR2200 or MR2600 and an external drive
more difficult to setup but it does the same job and more.
Yeah, but it only “works.” Time Machine backups get corrupted by SMB. Most NAS’s will let you set it up, even offer to advertise as a TM destination. Once the NAS is setup, adding TM is pretty easy. But within a few months you’ll get the “verification failed, please rebuild” message.
At least I’m assuming it’s SMB based on Google results. But there’s something unique about the Time Capsule that seems to be only way to do reliable wireless TM. I’ve tried a few different NAS options, they always get corrupted.
Well, when it verification fails, you can do two things:
But Time Machine will just do integrity checks, but not try to fix them.
And those errors usually come by an interrupted backup where you lost connection while doing backup.
And that can happen with a time capsule from Apple as well.