• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Internal vs. External HD for Backup?

P

P4Power

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 1, 2006
Messages
185
Hey guys. Right now my file server has a 1TB internal hard drive and is backed up to an external USB hard drive via Windows Server Backup. However, I am starting to run low on storage and I am going to upgrade to a 2TB drive soon.

My question is, should I simply buy 2x2TB hard drives and allocate one for a backup or buy 1x2TB internal drive and an external 2TB drive for backup? Is one setup less prone to failure than another or does it really matter?

Thanks in advance!
 
In my experience, one vulnerability of an external HDD is that it's fairly easy to knock it off the table while it's running and wreck the drive that way.
 
I went with the one cable external drive personally. I take it out of the little firesafe it sits in on Fridays, do a backup, and return it. The ransomware that specifically targets connected backups has scared me off of leaving a backup drive connected 24/7. It also keeps a fluke power surge from killing off my on site backup.

I would also recommend checking out CrashPlan's free 1 year trial.
 
With internal data storage you are always at the mercy of the PSU blowing up and killing the backup drive, lightning strikes, bad mobo controllers, you name it.

As others have said though you could always drop the external backup drive. So ideally you should have another backup that is not run at the same time.

For my pictures I have all the files on a HDD in my PC, this backs up to an external drive, and then I send via google drive 7zip files to my parents in England. This way acts of god don't kill all my files on the PC, or a fire for example.

And of course, if you are going for 2 of the same drives, ordered at the same time, run them for at least 100 hours before putting them into mission critical use, DOA and death shortly after arrival rates are quite high :)
 
I guess some people lead interesting lives - fires, floods, dropping hard drives, malware.

The only time I have used my backups is when my wife has deleted a file and wanted it back. Maybe 3 times in 20 years.

Backup is important but being concerned about rare events is taking things to far.
 
I guess I don't want to tell my kids 20 years from now that they don't have any childhood pictures because dad didn't want to spend ~$5 a month to make sure that nothing would happen to them.
 
GeorgeHR said:
I guess some people lead interesting lives - fires, floods, dropping hard drives, malware.

The only time I have used my backups is when my wife has deleted a file and wanted it back. Maybe 3 times in 20 years.

Backup is important but being concerned about rare events is taking things to far.
Click to expand...

Rare events are why you backup. You do not keep regular up2date backups for a planned event.
 
Internal backup is always convenient and good for frequent backups. I use externals as my master backups. Sometimes things can go wrong with the rig and your data can be at risk inside of it, plus in the event of a natural disaster it's really easy to just grab your external boxes and split.
 
Definitely internal. Physically more stable and faster data transfer speeds
 
Liggywuh said:
With internal data storage you are always at the mercy of the PSU blowing up and killing the backup drive, lightning strikes, bad mobo controllers, you name it.
Click to expand...

I guess one possible strategy would be to disconnect the cables to the drive when you're not going to be using it.
 
I appreciate all of the feedback! I have decided to go with 2x2TB internal drives plus an extra 2TB external drive. One internal drive will be used for daily backups and the external for maybe every week or 2 weeks and physically disconnected when not in use.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top