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Need external back up drive advice

Upchurch

Papa Funkosophy
Upchurch
Joined
May 10, 2002
Messages
34,265
Location
St. Louis, MO
Just what the title says. I've had a pretty major system crash which has highlighted my need for a reliable hard drive backup system. I need something at least on the 120 GB level (although more would be handy). Any advice on brands? epinions doesn't get much in the way of reviews on this sort of thing.
 
I've had the Maxtor OneTouch II for about a year now with no problems. It's not the quietest on the market (though it's by no means loud), and it does everything I need. It comes with all the software necessary to automate simple backup jobs (Retrospect Express), or you can just use it as another drive and copy data manually. It comes in a variety of sizes, mine being the 300GB one.

I've had less success with the kits where you build it yourself. It's a much cheaper route - you just buy the kit for around £20 or so and add whatever normal 3.5" drive you want - but in both the ones I've had, the fan became fairly noisy quite quickly.

Cheers,
Rat.
 
I have a Bytecc brand 5.25"external enclosure that I've used for archive or mass transfer purposes. The flexibility of being able to put whatever drive I want into it was the big selling point for me. Also I picked up a Seagate 300GB drive from Office Max a few months ago both for the price and the 5 year warranty. Most drives are coming with 3 year warranties these days.
 
160GB Buffalo Link Station connected to my network, all my PCs can access it (Mac/Windows/Linux) and you can attach a USB drive to auto backup.

I weekly backup to the Link Station, monthly from the Link Station to the USB drive and about every 3 months back the USB up to DVDs.
 
You can get LaCie boxes up to 2.5TB in capacity now. They also run on USB 2 and Firewire.

I am eyeing one of their 1TB boxes pretty closely right now.
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
I have a LaCie 160GB USB hard drive. Works great so far.

~~ Paul
Click to expand...
I finally went with the 250GB model, but not before I tried the system that Darat mentioned.

RANT! Which, by the way, was an utter POS from a marketing standpoint. The provided documentation did not match the drive in the box and the installation software was so f'd up the text bled off the side of its window. I probably could have made it work, but they did such a sloppy job with their materials, I really didn't trust them to have done a good enough job with the drive to risk my data by using it.

It may very well have been a good product, but they lost me before I could even power it up.


RANT! And while I'm at it, I'd just like to say that Alienware's tech support is the worst I have ever seen. It took our CIO threatening them financially to get them to honor their on-site service agreement, and even then, they're really just bringing me a loaner desktop so they can take my laptop back to their analysts.

I have a co worker with roughly the same system who had just about the same thing happen to him. It took them nearly a month to return his laptop to him, when it really just amounted to changing the motherboard.

You'd think being bought out by Dell would have improved their customer support!
 
xenxabar said:
Most drives are coming with 3 year warranties these days.
Click to expand...
Really ?

Most drive I bought in the last 2 years came with 1 year warranty. All Maxtor drive are all 1 year now. Are you in Europe ?

nimzo
 
I've always had a lot of trouble with backing up data. I maintain roughly 4 terabytes of storage (2 externals at 1tb each, 1tb raid-5, 320 external, 500 external and a bunch of others in various logical/phyical setups).

I've had to resort to prioritizing what is most important. Some of my stuff is on multiple drives. Other really important things are burned to dvd's.

For redundant storage of really big stuff, I've found the cheapest gb/$ ratio is still tape...but god it's so annoying and time consuming.

-Steve
 
Seagates come with 5 year warranties now. Everything else I've seen still has a 90 day to 1 year warranty.

for backup I prefer the systems with removable drives that can hot-swap. Then you can use backup drives like tapes and get real backups (i.e. the ability to move back in time over several version) and not just a synchronize.

Also easier to move to large sizes as needed, or to span across multiple drives.

Haven't done it yet, but I'm seriously considering one of these:
http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?product_code=333106&pfp=BROWSE

Granite Digital makes nice stuff too.
http://www.granitedigital.com/
 
Rat said:
I've had the Maxtor OneTouch II for about a year now with no problems. It's not the quietest on the market (though it's by no means loud), and it does everything I need. It comes with all the software necessary to automate simple backup jobs (Retrospect Express), or you can just use it as another drive and copy data manually. It comes in a variety of sizes, mine being the 300GB one.

...
Click to expand...

Same one, same size. Purchased after my second hard drive crash in a year. I turn that drive off, along with the backup service unless I'm actually doing a backup, because it takes much longer to bring my system up with it always on. I have had some weirdnesses with it though. Tried to do a backup last night and it said I have 22 restore points, but I couldn't see any of them in the list. The backup finished with an error message, but there is no way to trace what the heck it meant. (I think it's just that the drive was full).

It's also not a very intuitive interface for the manual operations. I suppose if you set all the defaults it may be pretty simple. I'm still not quite sure how it works. If I need to delete a file off that drive (to clear up some space) I don't know how to do it. I'd hate to delete my original restore points which I want to keep, JUST IN CASE.
 
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