Backing up work

Recently I have backed up my work to a Western Digital external hard drive and also dvd from my MacBook Pro. Yesterday my WD hard drive failed and will not boot up, it tries to and appears to keep resetting back to a start point and tries again before giving up and switching off. So i figure that this drive has now decided to give up.

Im a bit concerned about external hard drives now, but a friend has suggested a La Cie drive. Are these reliable and worth the money? How do you back up your important work? And with backing up to dvd how long will dvd disks last?

Luckily i haven't lost too much work as most of it was copied to dvd.

Thoughts and suggestions of what to back up to? 


Never been a fan of La Cie. They have always seemed to be the LG of hard drives.

Single-drive storage devices should not be considered your first line of defense. You want RAID1, which gives you 2 mirrored drives; if one fails you still have a copy. You swap out the bad one and the system re-mirrors for you. Use your external drive(s) to backup that and take them offsite.

Many like online ("cloud") backups; the downside is that the more data you have, the more painful that first backup can be.

DVD-Rs: 10 to 15 years, tops. If you're lucky. The material is organic and will fail. Even storing media in a cool closet I've had CD-R and DVD-R media go bad after 5 years. In your current situation, hopefully, you'll be able to recover.

I think both WD and Seagate kinda suck. I had plenty of luck with Maxtor before they got bought out. So now it's multiple copies.

There is a summary regarding DVD longevity in The Guardian  which contains a link to more information than you probably wanted on blank DVD quality at The Digital FAQ . It seems that some DVDs can last 200 years  . I did not know that.

I use an external Raid 5 for automatic backup. I always keep a current Acronis image of my PC OS. It has saved my life too many times.

Cloud storage providers monitor what you are storing and have suspended accounts for reasons you may or may not agree with.

If all you are backing up is your work then research the Solid State drives as an external backup. Since they do not have mechanical parts they do not break down on you, and the data last practically forever. I am thinking about scrapping the external HDs, in favor of the SS drives. They are a little more expensive but worth it from what I have been reading by users at other forums.

Joves wrote: If all you are backing up is your work then research the Solid State drives as an external backup. Since they do not have mechanical parts they do not break down on you, and the data last practically forever. I am thinking about scrapping the external HDs, in favor of the SS drives. They are a little more expensive but worth it from what I have been reading by users at other forums.

So far, seems to be true in as much as 25 years is longer than forever in the Moore's Law era.
I have two of these in Raid 0  pushing my sata 3 bus to the limit.

I have never met a drive yet that hasn't failed. We run several Raid1 setups but they are subject to fire and theft. We are pushing more and more to the cloud along with local HD's. Have not tried SS drives but since they are electronic they still are subject to failure. I know of a few photographers who still burn gold DVD's and keep them in fireproof safes.

+1 for raid drives & cloud storage. You can never have too many levels of back up

orion wrote: Recently I have backed up my work to a Western Digital external hard drive and also dvd from my MacBook Pro. Yesterday my WD hard drive failed and will not boot up, it tries to and appears to keep resetting back to a start point and tries again before giving up and switching off. So i figure that this drive has now decided to give up.

Im a bit concerned about external hard drives now, but a friend has suggested a La Cie drive. Are these reliable and worth the money? How do you back up your important work? And with backing up to dvd how long will dvd disks last?

Luckily i haven't lost too much work as most of it was copied to dvd.

Thoughts and suggestions of what to back up to? 

Get the La Cie drive after your vacation to new york , for now keep backing up on your dvds...

Have ordered a La Cie external hard drive today, comes with a 3 year warranty. Was the same price as my western digital. And i will continue to back up to dvd as well. Was looking at raid drives but find it confusing of what to go for. Does anyone have suggestions and/or links to which raid drives to go for?

orion wrote: Have ordered a La Cie external hard drive today, comes with a 3 year warranty. Was the same price as my western digital. And i will continue to back up to dvd as well. Was looking at raid drives but find it confusing of what to go for. Does anyone have suggestions and/or links to which raid drives to go for?

I'm sure wikipedia has a decent write up, but suffice it to say that RAID1 is your least expensive solution. That means that your data is "mirrored" and exists in 2 copies on 2 drives. If one drive fails you can remove it and swap in another, and the system will recreate the 2nd copy for you. The risk is if both drives fail at the same time. Which, while possible, is thankfully rare. If I have a drive go bad I shut down the storage device, remove the drive, and don't turn it on again until I've got the drive replaced (warranty replacement can take a week or more). Put the new drive in, turn it on, wait a day or two and it's good to go.

RAID5 is a bit more complex but equally robust. As long as only one drive at a time dies. I've been bit by this, however, and prefer mirroring. I can buy a 2-drive NAS device, 2 2TB drives, plug 'em in and put it on the network, and I'm good to go. Local mirrored storage.

As for SSDs failing, note that drives failiures are usually mechanical, not electronic. SSDs have no moving parts. Find out the MTBF values can compare, as well as the read/write lifetime of the drive.

I like  www.carbonite.com/

ubookoo wrote: I have never met a drive yet that hasn't failed. We run several Raid1 setups but they are subject to fire and theft. We are pushing more and more to the cloud along with local HD's. Have not tried SS drives but since they are electronic they still are subject to failure. I know of a few photographers who still burn gold DVD's and keep them in fireproof safes.

I would love to say you are wrong, but I'm in the same boat!  Drive's will fail sooner or later!

ubookoo wrote: I have never met a drive yet that hasn't failed. We run several Raid1 setups but they are subject to fire and theft. We are pushing more and more to the cloud along with local HD's. Have not tried SS drives but since they are electronic they still are subject to failure. I know of a few photographers who still burn gold DVD's and keep them in fireproof safes.

BTW you should ensure your service provider is backing up your data as well. Clouds dissipate, and your data on the server can go away. Been there, done that. The "cloud" is not magically reliable, it just offers different features.

garyrhook wrote:

ubookoo wrote: I have never met a drive yet that hasn't failed. We run several Raid1 setups but they are subject to fire and theft. We are pushing more and more to the cloud along with local HD's. Have not tried SS drives but since they are electronic they still are subject to failure. I know of a few photographers who still burn gold DVD's and keep them in fireproof safes.

BTW you should ensure your service provider is backing up your data as well. Clouds dissipate, and your data on the server can go away. Been there, done that. The "cloud" is not magically reliable, it just offers different features.

Could you expound on this "Clouds dissipate" please?  

Robert Chen wrote: Could you expound on this "Clouds dissipate" please?  

Trusting the "cloud" is no wiser than trusting a local storage device, if the service provider is not making an off-line backup of the data. You need to understand exactly how safe your data is once it's "out there". If your data in the cloud is on storage that goes south, and there's no backup copy, how much does that help you?

This happened to me at work once: my mail file (and many others, it turned out) on the mail server got corrupted. They were not making backups. My local copy was out of date because I foolishly thought they would be thorough with company data. I was wrong, but it least my inbox got cleaned out.

The "cloud" is a fine concept but you need to know what you're paying for. And only give it the trust it warrants.