Recommendations for External Hard Drive

Miscellaneous
61

I use Backblaze for my ultimate back-up.
For local external drives I have standardised on G Drives for my iMac. I do not know who owns the brand now as they have been described at different times as Hitachi, Western Digital and SanDisk and are exactly the same. I have five G Drives ranging from 3Tb to 12Tb including a 2x4Tb RAID. I have one for Time Machine and one for a separate back-up of key data using ChronoSync connected permanently. DEVONthink is on my iMac hard drive, but backed up to these two external drives. I connect others as needed to save archived files, photos, videos and video raw footage, then store them separately. Yes, I am paranoid about losing data.
The G Drives have been totally reliable for several years, whereas both Seagate and WD drives I have tried have failed relatively quickly.

1 Like
62

Welcome @Poromies

Thanks for sharing your experience and your very nice setup :slight_smile:

63

Hm, now I’m curious about the G-drives. Yeah, it is very unclear what they are ha ha! But they are enterprise-grade alright.

Searching a bit, I found these hard drives to be among the most recommended by a variety of sites - and they are very cheap. Amazon.com

2TB. I’m not affiliated with the manufacturer or Amazon ha ha ha

64

Be careful with those disks. They are 3.5 mechanical ones, 5400 rpm or 4200 rpm. Formatted as APFS will go slower and slower across time, and I “1 GByte/second” is a lie as USB 2.0 is about 60 MBytes/second and USB 3.0 should be 200 MByte/second as max speed.

In my experience, raw speed of a 5400/4200 mechanical disk is near to 6 MByte/second in RAW mode.

1 Like
65

If, as you should, you have an automatic/semi-automatic system for multiple backups, and it gets at all complicated, KEEP A WRITTEN RECORD of your system, and what is backed up to where, and clearly label the external drives. Perhaps a table or a flowchart. I find that if my system runs smoothly, I will eventually forget what is backed up where. Problems can arise where disks stop being big enough for everything, and you start backing up in multiple places. Having that drawer full of HDDs can be a problem as well as insurance.

If you are worried about reliability, one solution is an external USB drive enclosure that can be configured with 2 RAID drives, so when one drive fails, it can just be swapped for another one. Or of course, something like a Synology Diskstation with 2+ drives.

2 Likes
66

Noted rfog. They are very cheap tho, so buying extra ones is not a bad idea when there is no need for fast backup…

1 Like
67

I think the OP needs a solution that is relatively easy to set up. RAID and NAS are not the case, IMO (though I mentioned the latter). Agreed on the extremely important documenting what you have and what, how and when your data is and goes!

68 
  hard drive 01 + CCC
+ hard drive 02 + CCC (or TM)
+ Arq for direct online backups (also possible for the local backups above)
-------------------------------
Simple and effective basic strategy

:smiley:

Also, @Anna_123: Think about how critical your data really is. Honestly. Employing an NAS or RAID is possible but the simplest option would be similar to my example above.

While it’s wise to be diligent in your backups, the needs of an individual are less than corporate needs. I have plenty of data on my machines that I could honestly care less if I lost. These things are included in the backups I do for the important stuff. But you can also do a separate simple and focused backup on critical data, say the Databases folder in your home directory (assuming you’re storing your databases there).

69

I take Bluefrog’s point; there are some things I would be at very upset to lose (like photos, and the book draft that represents five years’ work, so far) but I have a lot of other stuff that is less important.

But my recollection is that configuring the WD USB External Drive as RAID was a matter of inserting the bare HDDs, running the included WD app, and choosing the apprpriate options from menus. Much easier than installing RAID on the PC itself. But my memory could be faulty as I just used the two HDDs as independent drives.

70

Every time I bought a multi-drive external enclosure (last one an OWC Thunderbay 4 slots) I tried to set up a decent RAID schedule, trying to mix striping with cloning, then just cloning, and every time I gave up, either because of software instability - yes, the included RAID app - after OS updates, or because it became just too complicated.

So I always ended up using it as JBOD.

Now I know that having a striped RAID is terrific for speed, but not my case.

71

That is simple. She also wants to backup videos, from my recollection.

1 Like
72

Hi, seems there are people around who know a lot about backups, so I’ll first ask here. If it’s better to start a new thread please let me know.

I’ll be finally replacing a MacBook Pro 2012 (500 GB, Mojave) with a M1 mac (2 TB).

Unfortunately I can’t test by now what would work (waiting for the new mac) and how to best make use of different apps (if necessary at all), so curious how others who are already familiar with new macOS, HFS vs. APFS etc. would handle this.

Old mac

  • Time Machine backups to an external 3 TB Western Digital HDD (volumes Time Machine and Storage)
  • clones (with archive, via ChronoSync) to two external 1 TB HDDs (rotating them, onsite/offsite)
  • So it’s:
    • 1 x HDD (Time Machine and storage)
    • 2 x HDD (on-/offsite clones)

Problems with the current backup “strategy”

  • I’m very lazy, which means I attached the external disk(s) every other day, sometimes only once a week (or after big changes).
  • since the Time Machine backup stopped working after some months I was thrown back to only the ChronoSync clones.
    • to make things worse I bought the clone HDDs at the same time …
      (but trying to somehow work around it by doing additional ChronoSync backups to 3 TB disk)
  • the 3 TB disk’s Storage volume isn’t included in the backup (yes, I know …).

Although knowing how important they are, I’m obviously weak in doing proper backups. (The main problem was attaching disks all the time …)

New mac

  • Backup apps that could be used:
    • ChronoSync
    • Carbon Copy Cloner (completely new, never used it)
    • Time Machine (from experience not sure whether I should use it again)
  • External disk: 8 TB SSD (planning to create a Backups and a Storage volume)
    (Far more space than I need (now), however I plan to use this setup for about ten years.)
    This will be always attached.
  • HDD/SSD disk station
    Disk will be attached only when necessary (to do backups).
  • will get a UPS (uninterruptible power supply; you can read about it here and here).

Questions

  1. My intial idea was to

    • backup internal SSD (or just important folders, not sure yet) e.g. hourly to external SSD’s Backups volume.
    • weekly backup external SSD’s Backups and Storage volume to external HDD (let’s call it “backup of the backup”)
    • This was the simplest setup I could think of: one SSD always attached (making it possible to automatically create backups) - and only attaching a HDD to create a “backup of the backup” (i.e. a backup of all the backups that happened when the external HDD wasn’t attached).
      • However if anything in the “internal to external SSD backup” would go wrong then errors would simply be copied over to the external HDD … so propably a bad idea?
      • Should I instead do a separate backup right from internal SSD (and external SSD’s Storage) to HDD?

  2. What’s your experience and recommendation for Carbon Copy Cloner snapshots?

    • Should I do internal SSD snapshots to the same SSD? (keeping in mind this is NO backup - the internal disk then also needs another backup)
    • Should I do internal SSD snapshots to external SSD?
    • Is it possible to backup existing snapshots to a HDD? Is it a good idea (thinking of APFS vs. HFS)?

  3. What’s your way to swap a “primary” backup disk’s contents (in my case: the external SSD’s Backups volume) to another disk in order to keep old backups as long as possible, preferably for many years?
    This question is probably not about simply cloning the disks. I don’t like the idea of buying new disks every now and then (and maintaing them to keep them alive) but rather add to some big HDDs (rotating them, onsite/offsite) for many years. But, of course, no idea what’s best practice.

  4. Any recommendation what HDD disk sizes to get?
    Pretty sure I don’t need much of the Storage volume any time soon, however depending on the schedule the Backups volume could grow quite quickly (especially thru CCC snapshots, I think). As I’ve no idea how exactly CCC snapshots could fit into a backup strategy and as I don’t know whether they can be copied to HDDs, I’m totally lost here. More space is probably better, but maybe getting more disks is the way to go? Really no idea. I’d like to keep it as simple as possible.

Sorry if this is a confusing post, I’m completely out of my depth when it comes to backups. What I’m looking for is a backup strategy that

  • is simple to use (I don’t care about the time for initial setup, as long as it “just works” in the end),
  • is reliable (different apps, on-/offsite, etc.),
  • basically just works for the next X years.

(BTW while looking for a proper backup strategy I’ve learned that ChronoSync can backup to different cloud services, e.g. iCloud.)

1 Like
73

As all I remember doing was read the instructions that came with the housing on this, I stand corrected.

Of course another strategy for security is to replace backup drives before they get too old and develop faults, say every n years. This would not guarantee anything but it might improve the odds. The problem is, what number should n be, especially for a drive that is used intermittently, like once a week. I don’t know that.

Would it be a sensible strategy to use a HDD for 3-4 years in a machine that is used most of the time, and then relegate it to a “third level” backup where it is accessed only once a month, (newer drives being used for the daily/hourly backup)?

1 Like
74

Hi reb,

I’ve been buying 1 or 2 drives every 3 years or so, yes. I usually go with what Backblaze is finding, THOUGH, and it is a BIG THOUGH, the exact codes/versions of the drives they mention are often nearly impossible to get, even at a place like newegg.

So I tend to look at overall what manufactures are doing well. Years ago, it was, for me, Samsung, but that has changed, and WD and others became more reliable. Also, a good deal of M&A’s so who knows…

But yes, about 3 years, and then I move older drives to as you say 3rd level. Or as spare backups which I do as a naked drive, using my Newertech Voyager, which is VERY useful. So like Jim, I have boxes of older naked drives, with various backups of older ages. Every year or two I run them on my Voyager, if any drive starts feeling ill (looking at Drive Rx), I open it, scratch the disks inside throroughly, and recycle.

And older disks are also useful as, in my case, Scratch disks for Adobe apps, and other apps that like having large scratch space.

75

Pete, I need some time to read your post, but will do it and add my 2 cents.
I did buy a MacbookPro 16" M1, refurbished from the Apple Store. It misbehaved from the beginning, had many panics, and I finally returned it to the local Apple Store - they were super nice.

Yeah, it’s a couple months wait currently.

While it lasted, the M1 was scary fast, ran absolutely cool, never heard the fan once.

Of course I was sad to loose a few apps, including Parallels. Parallels DOES run on M1, but it CANNOT use your existing virtual machines!!! And there is no way of converting. I had Win XP and Win 10.

1 Like
76

Pete, some thoughts.

I don’t think you should give up Time Machine at all. It saved me many times. I use a small app called TimeMachineEditor to run ™ every 5 hours, rather than automatically. It used to annoy me, and slow my machine a bit, to have it run automatically.

So your new M1 will come with a 2TB SSD (like mine was). I suppose you will be storing your data in there, or at least the data you usually or sometimes works with / want to have fast access to. I am assuming that this data is 1TB or less. You need to allow maybe 20% of the SSD free, or more.

Ideally, you would have several copies of your data.

These can be in:

1x 2TB SSD small portable, such as SanDisk, Samsung T-series. I like keeping one if I am mobile, or if I travel without the laptop and want to hide it somewhere (just don’t forget where you did :slight_smile:

1x Drive Hub like my OWC Thunderbolt 4-bays, I love it. I would use it just as JBOD ("just a bunch of disks"I and not RAID or anything unless you really need it, and would put in there:

  • 1x 2TB SSD internal (e.g., Micron) for data backup, in my case CCC, but your choice. I generally set mine to do incremental, without safety-net.
  • 1x 4TB HD for Time Machine. Large enough to give you a long time before filling the disk. Speed here is not that critical.
  • 1x 4TB HD for CLONING your internal SSD via CCC.
  • leave the 4th bay empty, or in the future you might set up some mirroring or striping (or an extra Time Machine drive)

1x External cheap hard drive 4TB, again clone your internal SSD

Backup your data AND system to the cloud. My strong recommendation is something like Backblaze. Never failed me, I had it for 10+ years (or maybe more?). Twice I had major system failures, and they sent me back all my MANY TB’s in USB or later hard drives. Backblaze will NOT backup your apps, just data, documents, system.

So now you have good redundancy: to the cloud (System, Data), local (not very movable: Time Machine, SSD clone, data), local (portable: Data)

Makes sense?

1 Like
77

I guess that’s true for any VM that runs an Intel operating system. Not surprising, really: there’s no Intel CPU available anymore to run the m code. And Rosetta is useless in this car because it can’t see inside the VM.

1 Like
78

Also, Backblaze does apparently not save macOS extended attributes like tags, keywords etc.

79

Sorry for the delay. Busy time at work. The new WD 2TB drive keeps giving me problems. When I click on a document in DT3 (any type of file) or use a shortcut to create a document, I see the spinning wheel for less for 20-30 secs. Also my computer gives me notifications that the drive is ejected improperly even if I never tried to eject it. I am guessing I need to return this drive and hope for a better one next.

I will read your comments more carefully later. By the way, I like your definition of ‘cheap’ for 2TB :slight_smile:

80

Yep. This has been a source of many debates along the years. In my case, I stopped years ago relying much on Finder labels, tags, keywords, as I would loose them in other situations as well, not just Backblaze.

But, now that you mentioned it - I made a small experiment. Selected a record in DT, added a label+tag, then “Show in Finder”. It opened the DT folder where it is (the typical, "Files.noindex/png/e/)

Then I removed the tag/label for that file. Back in DT, the file still has those. I am trying to understand better how this works. Did I put the system in an inconsistent state?

Did database verify&repair, no issues shown.

I don’t recall that well what happened in the distant past, I suspect I never lost extended attributes when restoring databases from backblaze, or even created times, etc. - but it could have been that I restored the databases from local copies, as I was always very paranoid to backup.

Any thoughts? More for Anna, I guess, and the question is whether backblaze will mess up Devonthink database records dates, extended attributes.