Groups | Search | Server Info | Keyboard shortcuts | Login | Register [http] [https] [nntp] [nntps]

Groups > comp.sys.mac.system > #54068

Re: External HD Recommendation

From Bread <BreadWithSpam@Fractious.net>
Newsgroups comp.sys.mac.system
Subject Re: External HD Recommendation
Date 2013-12-30 09:37 -0800
Organization lined up neatly
Message-ID <l9sb0f$98l$1@reader1.panix.com> (permalink)
References <281220130921464151%otto@bogus.address.com> <l9nbrf$qqu$1@reader2.panix.com> <vilain-E2F745.14592728122013@news.individual.net> <slrnlc1u6b.c4g.g.kreme@amelia.local> <291220132136524546%otto@bogus.address.com>

Show all headers | View raw

On 2013-12-30 05:36:52 +0000, Otto Pylot said:

> In article <slrnlc1u6b.c4g.g.kreme@amelia.local>, Lewis
> <g.kreme@gmail.com.dontsendmecopies> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> They are all getting progressively worse though.
> 
> This sure doesn't instill a lot of confidence in using an external
> drive for backup.

Don't buy it.  Hard drives are more reliable now than ever before.  Heads don't
crash, drivers and connectors are all standardized.  Heat is less of a problem
than ever before.  The progress in hard drives may well be more impressive than
the progress that's been made in solid state stuff like CPUs.  It's *hard* to
make devices with high-speed spinning parts so reliable and on such a massive
scale.  It's just astonishing.

Compared to floopies, Zip drives, almost any other magnetic media, modern hard
drives are, to borrow a phrase, insanely great.

That all said, if your data is important to you, you need at least two backups.

All of my machines get Time Machined to external drives, Crashplanned 
(only data
files, not the entire drive - but the data is much bigger than things like apps
and system stuff anyway) to two locations (not to the cloud), and, every once
in a while, I make SuperDuper clones.  But the clones really aren't 
very important.
They'd get me up and running again immediately if necessary (just plug one in,
boot up and be good to go, though some data would be stale).

The thing is that the SuperDuper clones require more intervention on my 
part and
the least reliable part of my backup system/workflow is *me*.  Crashplan and
Time Machine just happen.  YMMV, of course.

As for actual drives, I have a mix of things.  The Drobo is full of WD 
Red drives.
the various externals are a mix of seagate and WDs, most of them 
actually seagate
or WD enclosures which came with the drives in them, though I do have two OWC
enclosures that I stuck drives into myself.

Most of the time, my drives get retired not because they died but because they
were replaced with higher capacity ones.  In all the years, across 
dozens of drives,
I've only had a few (perhaps 4 or 5?) actually die on me.  Two were 
internals on
an old iMac which ran 24/7, and one was an internal on a MBP which also was run
pretty constantly.  Another was in the Drobo (simply swapped it out with a new
drive, Drobo reconstructs, magic!).  There had to be another one or two 
failures
along the way, but that, again, is out of many many drives over decades.

The point is that any given drive will eventually die.  In my 
experience, the vast
majority will be replaced due to capacity (or computer replacement) well before
the drives fail.  But at any point, you have to expect any drive to fail and be
prepared for it.  The odds that two or three critical drives will all 
fail at once,
especially if they are not all running 24/7 are very small.  So don't worry.

The biggest cause of backup failures is human intervention (or lack thereof as
necessary), not hard drive reliability, so I say to solve that problem first.

Back to comp.sys.mac.system | Previous | Next — Previous in thread | Next in thread | Find similar | Unroll thread

Thread

External HD Recommendation Otto Pylot <otto@bogus.address.com> - 2013-12-28 09:21 -0800
  Re: External HD Recommendation William Hanna <whanna@invalid.invalid> - 2013-12-28 09:44 -0800
    Re: External HD Recommendation Ant <ant@zimage.comANT> - 2013-12-29 09:37 -0800
      Re: External HD Recommendation Otto Pylot <otto@bogus.address.com> - 2013-12-29 10:08 -0800
        Re: External HD Recommendation android <here@there.was> - 2013-12-29 19:15 +0100
  Re: External HD Recommendation billy@MIX.COM - 2013-12-28 20:21 +0000
    Re: External HD Recommendation Michael Vilain <vilain@NOspamcop.net> - 2013-12-28 14:59 -0800
      Re: External HD Recommendation Otto Pylot <otto@bogus.address.com> - 2013-12-28 15:28 -0800
        Re: External HD Recommendation nospam <nospam@nospam.invalid> - 2013-12-28 20:17 -0500
        Re: External HD Recommendation Michael Vilain <vilain@NOspamcop.net> - 2013-12-28 17:34 -0800
          Re: External HD Recommendation nospam <nospam@nospam.invalid> - 2013-12-28 21:06 -0500
      Re: External HD Recommendation Jolly Roger <jollyroger@pobox.com> - 2013-12-29 04:18 +0000
      Re: External HD Recommendation Lewis <g.kreme@gmail.com.dontsendmecopies> - 2013-12-30 04:38 +0000
        Re: External HD Recommendation Otto Pylot <otto@bogus.address.com> - 2013-12-29 21:36 -0800
          Re: External HD Recommendation Michael Vilain <vilain@NOspamcop.net> - 2013-12-30 01:58 -0800
          Re: External HD Recommendation J Burns <burns4@nowhere.com> - 2013-12-30 10:20 -0500
            Re: External HD Recommendation Ant <ant@zimage.comANT> - 2013-12-31 07:32 -0800
              Re: External HD Recommendation J Burns <burns4@nowhere.com> - 2013-12-31 11:46 -0500
          Re: External HD Recommendation Bread <BreadWithSpam@Fractious.net> - 2013-12-30 09:37 -0800
            Re: External HD Recommendation Lewis <g.kreme@gmail.com.dontsendmecopies> - 2013-12-30 18:07 +0000
              Re: External HD Recommendation nospam <nospam@nospam.invalid> - 2013-12-30 13:13 -0500
              Re: External HD Recommendation Bread <BreadWithSpam@Fractious.net> - 2013-12-30 10:27 -0800
                Re: External HD Recommendation J Burns <burns4@nowhere.com> - 2013-12-30 14:15 -0500
                Re: External HD Recommendation Lewis <g.kreme@gmail.com.dontsendmecopies> - 2013-12-30 22:43 +0000
                Re: External HD Recommendation nospam <nospam@nospam.invalid> - 2013-12-30 18:09 -0500
                Re: External HD Recommendation J Burns <burns4@nowhere.com> - 2013-12-30 22:34 -0500
            Re: External HD Recommendation TaliesinSoft <taliesinsoft@me.com> - 2013-12-30 13:54 -0600
              Re: External HD Recommendation Otto Pylot <otto@bogus.address.com> - 2013-12-30 13:14 -0800
              Re: External HD Recommendation Bread <BreadWithSpam@Fractious.net> - 2013-12-30 14:49 -0800
          Re: External HD Recommendation Lewis <g.kreme@gmail.com.dontsendmecopies> - 2013-12-30 18:01 +0000
    Re: External HD Recommendation Jolly Roger <jollyroger@pobox.com> - 2013-12-29 03:59 +0000
      Re: External HD Recommendation George Kerby <ghost_topper@hotmail.com> - 2013-12-29 07:47 -0600
  Re: External HD Recommendation J Burns <burns4@nowhere.com> - 2013-12-28 17:52 -0500
  Re: External HD Recommendation Earl Grey <earl@t.net> - 2013-12-29 10:06 -0500
    Re: External HD Recommendation yellow label <here@there.was> - 2013-12-29 17:01 +0100
  Re: External HD Recommendation John Albert <j.albert@snet.net> - 2013-12-29 16:27 -0500
    Re: External HD Recommendation J Burns <burns4@nowhere.com> - 2013-12-29 21:29 -0500
      Re: External HD Recommendation claudel@sonic.net (Claude V. Lucas) - 2013-12-30 12:36 +0000
        Re: External HD Recommendation TaliesinSoft <taliesinsoft@me.com> - 2013-12-30 08:55 -0600
      Re: External HD Recommendation John Albert <j.albert@snet.net> - 2013-12-30 10:29 -0500
        Re: External HD Recommendation Martin Frost me at invalid stanford daht edu <nospam@stanford.edu.invalid> - 2013-12-30 19:56 -0800
          Re: External HD Recommendation Barry OGrady <atheist@hotmail.com.au> - 2013-12-31 19:18 +1100
            Re: External HD Recommendation Lewis <g.kreme@gmail.com.dontsendmecopies> - 2013-12-31 15:30 +0000
              Re: External HD Recommendation Ant <ant@zimage.comANT> - 2013-12-31 07:34 -0800
                Re: External HD Recommendation Barry OGrady <atheist@hotmail.com.au> - 2014-01-01 17:51 +1100
                Re: External HD Recommendation TaliesinSoft <taliesinsoft@me.com> - 2014-01-01 10:14 -0600
                Re: External HD Recommendation Jolly Roger <jollyroger@pobox.com> - 2014-01-01 17:39 +0000
                Re: External HD Recommendation Barry OGrady <atheist@hotmail.com.au> - 2014-01-02 11:54 +1100
                Re: External HD Recommendation Lewis <g.kreme@gmail.com.dontsendmecopies> - 2014-01-02 01:09 +0000
                Re: External HD Recommendation Michelle Steiner <michelle@michelle.org> - 2014-01-01 20:38 -0700
                Re: External HD Recommendation Lewis <g.kreme@gmail.com.dontsendmecopies> - 2014-01-02 16:47 +0000
                Re: External HD Recommendation Barry OGrady <atheist@hotmail.com.au> - 2014-01-09 08:13 +1100
                Re: External HD Recommendation Lewis <g.kreme@gmail.com.dontsendmecopies> - 2014-01-08 21:19 +0000
                Re: External HD Recommendation Jolly Roger <jollyroger@pobox.com> - 2014-01-02 02:35 +0000
              Re: External HD Recommendation Barry OGrady <atheist@hotmail.com.au> - 2014-01-01 17:47 +1100
                Re: External HD Recommendation nospam <nospam@nospam.invalid> - 2014-01-01 02:24 -0500
                Re: External HD Recommendation Barry OGrady <atheist@hotmail.com.au> - 2014-01-02 02:38 +1100
                Re: External HD Recommendation nospam <nospam@nospam.invalid> - 2014-01-01 11:55 -0500
                Re: External HD Recommendation J Burns <burns4@nowhere.com> - 2014-01-01 13:34 -0500
                Re: External HD Recommendation Leonard Blaisdell <leoblaisdell@sbcglobal.net> - 2014-01-01 19:01 -0800
                Re: External HD Recommendation Lewis <g.kreme@gmail.com.dontsendmecopies> - 2014-01-01 09:45 +0000
                Re: External HD Recommendation Barry OGrady <atheist@hotmail.com.au> - 2014-01-02 02:28 +1100
                Re: External HD Recommendation Lewis <g.kreme@gmail.com.dontsendmecopies> - 2014-01-01 15:36 +0000
                Re: External HD Recommendation nospam <nospam@nospam.invalid> - 2014-01-01 11:55 -0500
  Re: External HD Recommendation TaliesinSoft <taliesinsoft@me.com> - 2013-12-29 16:00 -0600
    Re: External HD Recommendation Jolly Roger <jollyroger@pobox.com> - 2013-12-29 22:01 +0000
      Re: External HD Recommendation TaliesinSoft <taliesinsoft@me.com> - 2013-12-29 16:19 -0600
        Re: External HD Recommendation Otto Pylot <otto@bogus.address.com> - 2013-12-29 14:45 -0800

csiph-web