It’s the time of year when I tidy up my computer hard drive and try to make space for next year. I’m planning to migrate a load of image files to external portable hard drives. My question is – does it make much difference which brand or model I use, or is it pretty much a gamble once you choose a drive by a “name” manufacturer – WD, Toshiba, Seagate, LaCie ? Are there any reviews that I can trust?

Burn to DVD
and

Print the best

and

Chisel onto the nearest cave wall for the ultimate backup.

It’s the time of year when I tidy up my computer hard drive and try to make space for next year. I’m planning to migrate a load of image files to external portable hard drives

You mean you do not update your archive every day (or at least when new images are added)?
If so why worry about a reliable external HD when you trust the one in the computer so much?

(Seagate/LaCie/WD are all owned by the same company now. I use G-tech made by hitachi as they are known to be reliable but all drives have a failure rate)

The accepted industry view is your data does not exist unless there are three instances of it, if you move everything from your machine to a single drive only you can judge the fallout of losing the content.

If your were talking about multiple copies on hdd then I’d go for drives from different companies so a wd and seagate or hitachi etc. Or consider one hdd and then a cloud based offering.

The aim is to spread the risk.

am using 2 Lacie external hard drives and never had a problem in 10 years

one is used as a time machine back up and one a standard select and copy over certain files kinda drive

Just now I have a number of older archives on various disks plus TM backups. Going forward I am looking to rationalise – copying all the archives into a properly organised collection on a single drive and duplicating on multiple additional drives. Thanks for the ideas!

Google photos. I pay about the cost of a 1TB drive/year for a complete cloud copy of my photo’s and I have 700GB free

this gives some insight but they are not small mobile drives

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-failure-rates-q1-2017/

I pretty much use Seagate for all my backup drives now. They seem to work at a decent speed and I’ve never had any problems. I’ve had Lacie and WD drives fail but as always I may just have been unlucky

If I was going down the cloud route I would probably pick Office365 family over Google photos as then I get 1TB per user plus Word/Excel etc which is unfortunately still very useful indeed

Thanks for the link MrS. I used to use Backblaze but let my subscription lapse during a budget crisis.

aye google photos, I just fire them up there automatically with their compression, all looks fine to me. Obviously if you must have original quality that’s a no go*, but if you aren’t bother about that, it’s unlimited and cost you heehaw. Plus you can then access the photo’s anywhere and never need to organise them ever again.. happy days! 🙂

*or just do what mike does and pay for the full bhoona on the cloud.

and that link proves the point – they have Seagate as the least reliable :). Oh well

If you want a true archive that will last, a hard disc isn’t it. 10 years down the line you may find it won’t spin up at all, especially if sat unused.

Rewritable CDs/DVDs even aren’t terribly great as they die over time.

There are archive grade ones though.

Multiple copies of stuff is best, and keep checking them, or make fresh copies from time to time.

And, cloud storage also.

Amazon Glacier is designed for archiving. Low cost. Slow to extract, but the point is for archive, not rapid access.

Google as said, or there’s OneDrive, and if you have or may want Office, a 365 subscription gets you Office + 1TB of OneDrive storage. No limits to types of files, so fill it up with raw files etc. Some other cloud services can be limited to JPEGs and may even mess with your files to “optimise” them.

As a backup disc and for just one of those copies kicking around, most portable drives are fine. WD / Seagate are pretty good. I have my stuff in the cloud, on my desktop and backed up to my NAS (RAID array) which is itself backed up to a WD portable drive.

and reliability of drives in tests can be related to 24/7 use, which is very different from occasional backup and archive.

What’s the longevity of USB ‘thumb’ drives (since they aren’t spinners)?

Seen as you can get 64Gb drives for <£20…

Depends on the memory chips inside.

Don’t know about the thumb type USB stuff as not had one fail yet, but I’ve had loads of issues with memory cards, from Compact Flash to Micro SD (especially Micro SD, very poor reliability). Essentially the same flash memory, but the smaller the chips I feel the less reliable they are. When they die, they can just utterly die. Not just corrupted files, the whole thing is totally dead and nothing will recover it.

But no harm in making a load of copies on USB sticks in addition to other options.

Strangely enough as storage gets cheaper it is getting more difficult to archive things for a long time. Paper was amazingly good really. You can use hard disks but they need to be cycled correctly. Sticking them in a drawer doesn’t cut it

Cloud is not a bad idea really, at least at the moment where longevity doesn’t come into the picture. Folks are becoming more aware of it though so that might change

I decided to stick all mine on a 1TB WD external HD. Paid about £70 for it, stuck all the photo’s on plus a few movies, never did much with it for about a year.
So obviously when it was around 3 months out of warranty it broke. Still got it but it’ll cost in the region of £90 to retrieve the data.

Seems like youv’e got to back up your back up by backing the back up, up.

Or stick it in the sky with the clouds.

2 drives for £140.
Photographs/memories, priceless….

Ask five geeks for HDD recommendations and you’ll get five different answers.

For external storage I’d go Toshiba or WD. For internal, HGST or whatever they’re called this week.

SD etc, Sandisk from a reputable supplier. Life’s too short to piss about with shit storage.

2 x cloud drives (One Drive and Amazon)
1 x WD NAS
Laptop

That is my current set up anyway.

I may upgrade my Adobe account soon and get some cloud storage there too 😉

For internal, HGST or whatever they’re called this week.

If it wasn’t you saying that I’d have pissed myself laughing. Had no idea they were worth owning especially with the old Deathstar line still going!

Just shows you, all manufacturers have their ups and downs.

Yeah, that was kinda my point, geeks have long memories. You could say the same of most manufacturers, Seagate have had some shockers and I’ve lost count of the number of Fujitsu HDDs I’ve had to replace but it must be at least 50.
The old Deathstar fiasco is way back in history, they’ve been bang on for years now.

Strangely enough many years ago on here I was poo pooed re strage and degradation, loss of content etc…..
Seems my concerns were justified

DVD’s are terrible for degredation, I’ve known that for years, witnessed one fuzzing up in the space of a fortnight once.

Cougar – yeah, Deathstars must be what, 2003 or so?

Are there ssd external drives? There must be more reliable than the spinny type…. One of these and a mounting cradle?

You could use an ssd as an external but it’s going to be more expensive and still only give you 1 failure really.
I’d go with
On Machine – if your out of space 1 spinning extra drive
Off Machine 1 back up drive again spinning for cost/size
CLOUD!

I have a spare HDD kicking around (1tb), how easy and what software to set this up as an automated back up for all the oab_laptops? Currently it’s a monthly manual chore…

Depends what OS.

I store most stuff on a cloud drive these days (Amazon for personal, Office365 for work.) Those directories are Time Machine backup’d to LaCie NAS RAID drives. And they are also archived using Arq to a cloud drive.

So local resilience, cloud resilience and cloud backup 🙂

I have a Synology Diskstation with 2 x 1TB drives setup as RAID mirror – i.e. the 2nd drive is a copy of the 1st drive.
I also backup that to Amazon Glacier.

I work in data preservation and we’re moving to using Object Storage as a technology. That’s like software controlled RAID (in a way), and is what Amazon, Google, Facebook etc run on, and will probably be the next big thing in consumer storage.

Out of interest what do the Cloud companies store your uploaded data on?

I’m getting the feeling that I should re-visit my backblaze subscription. I have about 2TB of mostly RAW files that I need to archive.

DrJ, roughly how much data are you talking? I’m my, limited, experience of personal backups/archives, the strategy is very dependent on size of data.

nick1962 – Member
Out of interest what do the Cloud companies store your uploaded data on?

Enough redundant storage to give you 99.999% uptime generally

Out of interest what do the Cloud companies store your uploaded data on?

Yep, good old fashioned hard drives – but “lots” of them distributed over multiple data centres in multiple countries.

I’ve just moved all my (pre daily backup) stuff online after finding out my external hard drive had developed a fault, also moved a load of stuff off CDR to online as those were starting to peel from 10-15 years ago.

More than happy to accept their risk is lower than my risk