Urgent advice needed - External Hard Drives

[FlashSA]

My company has very poor backup procedures and I need to correct this before we have a PC failure \ theft...

I have decided on an external USB hard drive to quickly backup data from my pc on a daily basis and then store the drive in our safe overnight.

Now I need to decide - 2.5inch self powered or 3.5inch External powered. Which size hard drive is more reliable? I am thinking the bigger drive should be more reliable.

Thoughts?

 

[Mars]

personally, I think hdd's are not the best for backing up. Especially external drives. Drop the thing and all your backups are history (pun intended ) I would rather go for a blue ray writer and just write the stuff do disk.
You can do incremental backups so depending on the amount of data you are backing up, it shouldn't take too long.
Otherwise a tape drive is a very reliable way to backup, and might be the same price as a blue ray writer, although it takes much longer to do the backup.

But if you're dead set on an external hdd, there is no reason to go for a usb powered one. Rather get a self powered one. As big as your budget allows.

 

[FlashSA]

personally, I think hdd's are not the best for backing up. Especially external drives. Drop the thing and all your backups are history (pun intended ) I would rather go for a blue ray writer and just write the stuff do disk.
You can do incremental backups so depending on the amount of data you are backing up, it shouldn't take too long.
Otherwise a tape drive is a very reliable way to backup, and might be the same price as a blue ray writer, although it takes much longer to do the backup.

But if you're dead set on an external hdd, there is no reason to go for a usb powered one. Rather get a self powered one. As big as your budget allows.

Yeah I hear you on the dropping aspect.......

But the price of an external HDD versus Blueray writer is just too big right now....

I think I am going to go for the R699 500GB External drive that Incredible Corruption has on special. It's a seagate which I trust. Plus it has a 2 year warranty.

 

[InTheCube]

Use the HD for daily/weekly backups.

But you should also Burn your backups to DVD/Blu-Ray every now and then. As a safety precaution. And store your backups off-site, especially the DVD/Blue-Ray.

 

[FlashSA]

Use the HD for daily/weekly backups.

But you should also Burn your backups to DVD/Blu-Ray every now and then. As a safety precaution. And store your backups off-site, especially the DVD/Blue-Ray.

100% agree...

just bought the drive - now to start backing up

 

[NGR]

Another idea, how big are the backups?

We helped one of our customers setup an online backup service. They only really need to backup their word/excel etc documents - about 100MB in total. They use software which scans the folder each morning, and uploads all files which have changed since their last backup to a server on the internet. Whats nice is that if the office burns down, gets robbed, flood hits the area or anything like that - they have access to their documents. Whats is also nice is that it is automated, so it eliminates problems due to lazy staff....

Obviously it gets expensive and time consuming if you have large files that need to be backed-up!

 

[Savage152]

What I've done at our offices is set up a DLink DNS-323 NAS system. I just hid this in an inconspicuos place, but it would probably fit into a safe, provided you could get power and a lan cable into the safe somehow, also provided the safe was large enough that the system didn't overheat.

The advantages - You can schedule backups without having to physically get the drive, plug it in and run backups on a weekly or daily basis, and the system I have set up is running the drives in Raid 1, so if one drive konks out, the second one has an exact copy of the first, you plug in a new drive, and it mirrors itself automatically.

The disadvantages - If your business catches fire, the drives may not survive, but then Blu Ray disks are at even more of a risk, unless you take them offsite.