• Hi, I am the owner and main administrator of Styleforum. If you find the forum useful and fun, please help support it by buying through the posted links on the forum. Our main, very popular sales thread, where the latest and best sales are listed, are posted HERE

    Purchases made through some of our links earns a commission for the forum and allows us to do the work of maintaining and improving it. Finally, thanks for being a part of this community. We realize that there are many choices today on the internet, and we have all of you to thank for making Styleforum the foremost destination for discussions of menswear.
  • This site contains affiliate links for which Styleforum may be compensated.
  • We would like to welcome House of Huntington as an official Affiliate Vendor. Shop past season Drake's, Nigel Cabourn, Private White V.C. and other menswear luxury brands at exceptional prices below retail. Please visit the Houise of Huntington thread and welcome them to the forum.

  • STYLE. COMMUNITY. GREAT CLOTHING.

    Bored of counting likes on social networks? At Styleforum, you’ll find rousing discussions that go beyond strings of emojis.

    Click Here to join Styleforum's thousands of style enthusiasts today!

    Styleforum is supported in part by commission earning affiliate links sitewide. Please support us by using them. You may learn more here.

Most dependable back-up option for your computer?

who8mahrice

Senior Member
Joined
Feb 18, 2008
Messages
929
Reaction score
29
Don't know about the desktop/3.5" models, but I've found the laptop/2.5" Seagates to be reliable. I'm running on a Seagate right now *shrug* At least when I bought my laptop a couple years ago, reviews seemed unanimously better for Seagate.
 

michaeljkrell

Distinguished Member
Joined
Sep 22, 2006
Messages
4,551
Reaction score
0
Yeah, I decided to get a couple of 500mb Seagates primarily because of the 5 year warranty. We will see what happens.
 

Matt

ex-m@Triate
Joined
Jan 14, 2005
Messages
10,765
Reaction score
275
I run a small business and am kind of a backup nazi, having learned the hard way more than once.

This will be more than you need, but what we do in here is we have everyone's PC automatically backup their email folder to our server daily.

The server backs up twice daily to a USB hard drive. We have 2 of those that we alternate, one stays in the office, the other goes home every night with my assistant...so basically if the office burns down over night, we lose only a day as the other one is at her house. Similarly, if one of the drives dies, we lose no more than a day.

Since I do my best to discourage staff saving data on their own PCs, if a workstation drops we don't lose too much, other than their email, which also means they could lose one day maximum again and can be very easily restored either direct from the server or from one of the USBs. Indeed, when my laptop was stolen by The French, certainly I lost a bit of data - mostly presentations I prepared and delivered from that lappie, or otherwise stuff I wrote while I was traveling somewhere - but it was hardly terminal, and I was functional on the new machine within a few hours of my return.

Anyhow - overkill for your purposes, but having 2 drives alternate isn't a bad idea just in case.
 

Ace Rimmer

Senior Member
Joined
Oct 17, 2007
Messages
756
Reaction score
5
I build my own PCs. No HD manufacturer is perfect*, so you just hedge your bets by running a mirror or do manual backups. My current home PC is running two Western Digitals and one Seagate.

An off-site backup is key if you don't want to lose data to natural disasters and the like. I have a separate HD in a safe deposit box at my bank, along with DVD-R copies of critical data. The DVD-Rs are in case there is an EMP in the area and the HD is wiped. Come to think of it, if there is an EMP in my area I'm probably toast anyway, but at least my data will be good.
laugh.gif


HTH!

*: However, some mfrs have better reputations than others. Personally I avoid Maxtor. I like WD and Seagate. I have no opinion on Hitachis. YMMV.
 

constant struggle

Distinguished Member
Joined
Feb 21, 2007
Messages
5,083
Reaction score
112
Can anyone recommend me an external harddrive that comes with the enclosure included and a FAN. The fan is a must as a common harddrive failure is due to heat.
Preferably around 500 gb or more..
 

Tarmac

Distinguished Member
Joined
Mar 19, 2006
Messages
7,134
Reaction score
39
What's the advantage of having a hard drive which is guaranteed to last 5 years vs. one which is guaranteed to last 1?

When you lose your data (note I said when, not if), the 5 year warranted drive will have more precious information on it.

If you have anything of even slight business importance on your computer, you should be using RAID. If you are using it personally, you can probably get away with a dedicated storage drive for precious docs and back them up every week or so.
 

crazyquik

Distinguished Member
Joined
May 8, 2007
Messages
8,984
Reaction score
44
Save to gmail?
 

Optimas

Active Member
Joined
May 13, 2007
Messages
37
Reaction score
0
Gmail might work, I have yet to come across a dependable, simple and automatic solution. My main backup device is the Drobo (see http://drobo.com/), expensive but worth it if you need it (most, including me, don't). In addition, I have installed Mozy to have an offsite backup of my essential documents. Mozy offers 2GB of free storage online, this should be more than enough for many.

There are many technically brilliant solutions out there, I think the most important point is that backup has to be done automatically. If you have to do anything at all to make backups, it will probably not get done at all.
 

michaeljkrell

Distinguished Member
Joined
Sep 22, 2006
Messages
4,551
Reaction score
0
Originally Posted by Tarmac
What's the advantage of having a hard drive which is guaranteed to last 5 years vs. one which is guaranteed to last 1?

When you lose your data (note I said when, not if), the 5 year warranted drive will have more precious information on it.

If you have anything of even slight business importance on your computer, you should be using RAID. If you are using it personally, you can probably get away with a dedicated storage drive for precious docs and back them up every week or so.


Well, I will be mirroring the two Seagates.
 

indy116

Senior Member
Joined
Jul 7, 2008
Messages
240
Reaction score
0
Yea, jungledisk should be a good one since it's based on Amazon's system. I've heard Leo Laporte talk about it and was pretty impressed.

The offsite backup is a good idea for business data. Buddy in college said his boss used the back of the car as the "offsite location" until they realized a tornado during the day may well take out both copies.

Once you make your backup, make sure you can restore from it! I tried to help some guys restore an entire OS load from a few years prior. They'd used Ghost to make a backup of the drive and put the CD's in a safe place. When the HD of the computer died, we discovered that their backup had two copies of the third CD, and none of the second. Essentially, they had no backup.
 

ChriO

Well-Known Member
Joined
Dec 1, 2007
Messages
75
Reaction score
1
A RAID is not a backup! The only thing a RAID is protecting you from is a single hard disk (in a larger raid array it can be more than a single hard disk) failing. It doesn't protect you from all the other possibilities of losing data:

- user error: If you delete something it might be gone forever. No matter if you run a RAID or single disk
- theft: When it is gone, it's gone
- fire/flooding (sometimes both, courtesy of the fire department): Kills the whole RAID and possibly backups in the same location
- short circuit in the system that fries more or less everything

It also happens that people have a data loss for one reason or other and in the attempt to restore the files from their one and only backup they destroy that backup or have to realize that their backup is corrupted as well. The later frequently happens when the data loss wasn't the result of a hard disk's instant failure but due to a condition that already destroyed some data but went unnoticed. A well known example is a virus infection.
Make sure that you use a backup software that checks the integrity of a backup after it was created to reduce that risk.
 

montecristo#4

Stylish Dinosaur
Joined
Jan 7, 2004
Messages
12,214
Reaction score
21
Originally Posted by indy116
Yea, jungledisk should be a good one since it's based on Amazon's system. I've heard Leo Laporte talk about it and was pretty impressed.

The offsite backup is a good idea for business data. Buddy in college said his boss used the back of the car as the "offsite location" until they realized a tornado during the day may well take out both copies.

Once you make your backup, make sure you can restore from it! I tried to help some guys restore an entire OS load from a few years prior. They'd used Ghost to make a backup of the drive and put the CD's in a safe place. When the HD of the computer died, we discovered that their backup had two copies of the third CD, and none of the second. Essentially, they had no backup.


Can you actually do a backup like that? If my hard drive dies, I can backup my data, but I still have to reinstall every goddamn application I own. Major pain **********. Would be nice to just have something to load right on a new hard drive that would work without reistalling applications.
 

ChriO

Well-Known Member
Joined
Dec 1, 2007
Messages
75
Reaction score
1
That is no problem. It's basically a 1:1 copy of the system. The backup software allows you to compress it to save space and gives you a few other options as well. "Ghost", "True Image" and a few other programs offer this.
 

Featured Sponsor

How important is full vs half canvas to you for heavier sport jackets?

  • Definitely full canvas only

    Votes: 55 35.5%
  • Half canvas is fine

    Votes: 60 38.7%
  • Really don't care

    Votes: 17 11.0%
  • Depends on fabric

    Votes: 27 17.4%
  • Depends on price

    Votes: 28 18.1%

Forum statistics

Threads
505,203
Messages
10,579,247
Members
223,890
Latest member
2sleight
Top