Best easy and reliable data backup

Scream And Fly

Scream And Fly

Gawd
Joined
Nov 27, 2005
Messages
821
Hi all,

I am a photographer so I have a lot of files I keep backed up onto an external drive. I wanted to add an external drive to my computer that would just sit there connected to it so I can access my backed up files anytime I want, and additionally I would back up my files to the other external drive, as well as my off-site drive I keep at another place.

My real question is - would an SSD ultimately be more reliable than a standard, mechanical hard drive? I thought about a RAID enclosure as well... I would really appreciate your thoughts.

Thanks!
 
SSDs sure aren't cost effective when it comes to storing large amounts of photos - the $/GB is still much too high.

Rsync would do what you need (able to back up to onsite and offsite locations) at scheduled times... but I'm out of touch with what you need to do to get that working with Windows (assuming you're a Windows user) - could be a place to start looking, though.

How many TB are you talking? Do you want/need redundancy in your backups?
 
I'd say an Intel or Samsung SSD is going to be more reliable than any spinning disk but I do not know of any good real world numbers. If you have a laptop too and it'd be handy to carry around one of these drives with you, then SSD would also be smaller/more rugged. But if they're just sitting on a desk somewhere you can get 2+ spinning disks for the cost of an SSD.
 
Don't ever think of RAID as a backup solution.
Most people thought mirroring RAID type like RAID 1 could serve as a backup solution, and it was not the case.
If you had a corrupted file on the original drive, it would be mirrored in its corrupted state to the rest of the array too (thus the "mirror" name).
 
Oh and multiple external drives, each mirroring your local photos folder. Use synctoys or freefilesync sync the folders.

If you ever have multiple systems and want to share files between them all setup a system and install FreeNAS on it, very easy to use. Put 2 drives on there as a RAID1 mirror, You could let it do periodic snapshots and stuff. And you'd still use those external drives to do backups to.

But yeah long as you have less than 1 drive worth of files, so <4TB, and only have one system really needing access, just get a couple external drives and use synctoys.
 
Scream And Fly said:
My real question is - would an SSD ultimately be more reliable than a standard, mechanical hard drive? I thought about a RAID enclosure as well... I would really appreciate your thoughts.
Click to expand...

No. While there's debate whether SSDs fail more or less often than HDs it's clear that they fail more often in relation to capacity. Also, when they fail it is often more catastrophic, e.g. the HDs loses a bunch of sectors but you can copy most, the SSD has the controller crap out and everything is lost.

You should also be aware that SSDs do a self-refresh when powered on and that they simply forget their contents when sitting on a shelf or in a laptop bag for too long. It can be as little as a year and there isn't much data available.
 
Hero1711 said:
Don't ever think of RAID as a backup solution.
Most people thought mirroring RAID type like RAID 1 could serve as a backup solution, and it was not the case.
If you had a corrupted file on the original drive, it would be mirrored in its corrupted state to the rest of the array too (thus the "mirror" name).
Click to expand...

Well, the corrupted files will also overwrite the backup on plain external HDs. The fix for that is snapshots in the backup system but now you have a more complicated backup system.
 
Hi,
Looks like you need some suggestions. However, before I can help you, please provide me with more information about your search. There are a few questions that I need you to answer:

What operating system are you using?
What interface are you using or prefer?
What is your required storage capacity?
What is your budget?
 
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