once I get the other stuff I need like proper hdmi output... and maybe a cintiq, I'll be investing in a thermaltake sata drive dock... and use harddrive exclusively to store long term data... have 2 or 3 drives just sitting around and plug one in to put stuff on and put them back on the shelf... no constant power, no plugged into anything... no worries of mechanical failure unless a drive falls on the floor.
my passports been dropped crushed and used as a door prop still works like a beaut. but yeah i wouldnt trust it with the only copy of important stuff, esp the way i treat it.
my My Book bugged out a few months back. Couldnt access any of the data on it at all. Then one day I have it plugged into my computer, turned on my computer and my computer tryed to boot from my My Book for some reason. Found some corrupted file and deleted.
Works fine now but I dont really trust it anymore : /
I don't bother with buying external HDD's for storage at home. I just have the Thermaltake dock for all my SATA drives. I write who the drive is for and log what it is on the front. If there's something I want to move from comp to comp. I have a 80GB USB drive that's usually empty.
::LINKY::
My WD Passport was an absolute piece of garbage. It failed once and I lost every piece of software I had collected in the past 20 years. I thought perhaps it was just a corrupted master file table issue but after nearly losing the whole partition a second time, I had no doubt it was beginning to have mechanical problems. Luckily I was able to recover most of the data on the drive before it finally failed for good. The attenuator heads would click and grind like a coffee grinder from the day I bought the thing. I have had techs trash talk SeaGate hard drives but out of the 10 that I own, not a single one of them has failed yet. Stay away from WD's if you value your data and your money. Buyer beware! You were warned.
I wouldn't trust a regularly used external hard drive after 3 years. Hard drives really shouldn't be moved around, they aren't a long term backup solution, but can be a fine extra offsite backup option or used to transfer files without the internet.
(EDIT: I personlly use WD Red HDDs in my NAS's, they've been great for the cost, and I have them running automated weekly testing for failures. All drives fail in time, all! So, replace them when they start to fail.)
DVDR's do not seem to fail at all, sucks we got "moved/funneled" away from a decent solution as long as you kept them out of sunlight/microwaves or getting scratched they seem fine... i say bring them back.
Ehm... I do backups to Blu Ray - at 50 GB a pop it seems like the most sensible option nowadays to completely offload large chunks of data. Am I doing this wrong?
Didn't notice any losses so far (about one decade in by now).
Btw. that is one hell of an ancient thread and I'm sure Western Digital drives have been considered the worst as well as the best of the available options a few times over by now. My last couple machines including the current one have always contained a WD Red HDD as a backup drive.
@thomasp Not sure about BluRay in particular, but cd's and dvd's have quite bad bitrot, and it's precisely the fact that this only shows up years later (when you're increasingly likely to depend on it) that makes it so unfortunate. Given that it's also an optical medium, I'd at least look it up and see if there's any information on the reliability! HDD's are probably the best. I have one local external drive, and I use Backblaze to back my pc up to cold storage.
But so far I can update my info from back then I do not do DVD anymore but I have my important stuff now on two-drives raids as backup and a two-drives raid back-backup Beside that I have a quick-backup where I just copy-paste day-to-day version of the file to another internal drive This makes it 5 backups beside the original in the working folder and overall it is not too expensive to setup. Edit: also you should keep your auto save directory on a different drive - that saved me quite some times already..
Polycount! There's a name I haven't heard in a long time... I'm not sure how this thread got necro'd and into my email, but it's nice to see some familiar names. Also, cloud storage 4TW. There weren't a lot of options for that back in 2009, but it's all I use now unless I am literally going to sneakernet something between machines in my office.
Time-honored system is 3 copies of your important data: 2 copies onsite + 1 copy in the cloud (or at a friend's house).
I've lost data, and it's painful. I've also had drives start to fail, and replaced them before any loss.
Drives all fail at some point, both HDDs and SSDs. Backblaze shares some nice data on this. If you care about your data (and who doesn't?) you should be auto-testing drives periodically for errors, and replacing as soon as they start to fail.
There's also risk of a lost device, a house fire, a theft, or malware. Lots of reasons to do good backups!
Replies
screw backing up to dvds :P
stuff like
NETGEAR SC101 Storage Central
or
Iomega Storcenter Network Hard Drive
access over LAN or eSATA
Works fine now but I dont really trust it anymore : /
I have 3 WD HDDs in my comp and 1 external. They all work perfectly. Sorry you got a bad HDD.
::LINKY::
LOOOL
Personally I really care about my data, a lot of it is irreplaceable, so I invest in redundant backups. I use NAS devices and the cloud. More about that here https://www.reddit.com/r/qnap/comments/dehngo/how_to_protect_your_data_raid_is_not_a_backup/
As an artist, losing my data suuuuuuucks!
(EDIT: I personlly use WD Red HDDs in my NAS's, they've been great for the cost, and I have them running automated weekly testing for failures. All drives fail in time, all! So, replace them when they start to fail.)
https://cosmosmagazine.com/technology/materials/long-term-data-storage-in-glass/
https://opg.optica.org/optica/fulltext.cfm?uri=optica-8-11-1365&id=462661
But so far I can update my info from back then
I do not do DVD anymore but I have my important stuff now on two-drives raids as backup and a two-drives raid back-backup
Beside that I have a quick-backup where I just copy-paste day-to-day version of the file to another internal drive
This makes it 5 backups beside the original in the working folder and overall it is not too expensive to setup.
Edit: also you should keep your auto save directory on a different drive - that saved me quite some times already..
Also, cloud storage 4TW. There weren't a lot of options for that back in 2009, but it's all I use now unless I am literally going to sneakernet something between machines in my office.
I've lost data, and it's painful. I've also had drives start to fail, and replaced them before any loss.
Drives all fail at some point, both HDDs and SSDs. Backblaze shares some nice data on this. If you care about your data (and who doesn't?) you should be auto-testing drives periodically for errors, and replacing as soon as they start to fail.
There's also risk of a lost device, a house fire, a theft, or malware. Lots of reasons to do good backups!