Backup for external drive

[brenda TN]

I have read everything and am more confused than ever. Hope I get an answer in plain language for an un-geek. I have an older late 2009 macbook. I have a WD my book studio that has over 3,000 pictures stored on it. I need a backup for it. I have to upgrade to Mountain Lion to use Lightroom 5. I don't think I will go to Maverick because of the issues with wd. I read on the site yesterday that even the new update is killing the drives.
Looking at the wd my book studio for $119 at Amazon for my backup of my drive. http://www.amazon.com/Book-Studio-External-Drive-Storage/dp/B0090A8TWW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1386331430&sr=8-1&keywords=wd+my+book+studio
Is that my best solution? I can't figure out the difference between it and the wd my book cloud. http://www.amazon.com/Personal-Cloud-Storage-Share-Photos/dp/B00439GMJ2/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1386331516&sr=8-4&keywords=wd+my+book+cloud

 

[Fishrrman]

You might consider using a USB3/SATA docking station for backups.

To see what these are, go to amazon and enter "usb3 sata dock" into the search box, and you'll see many choices.

The dock sits on your desktop, and you can just put a "bare drive" (can be 3.5" or 2.5", regular HHD or an SSD) into it and use it, same as you would an external drive. The advantages are:
- It's easy to swap one drive around for another -- makes multiple backups simple.
- If there's a problem with the drive (or dock), just swap the component out for another and keep going.

The disadvantage is that it may not look as snazzy as a "pre-packaged" drive sitting on your desktop. And a little more involved to tote around with you, if you carry it with the MacBook.

I noticed your Macbook is a 2009, so I'll guess it has just USB2, correct?
You should know that USB3 devices are "backward compatible" with USB2.
Pick up USB3 (instead of USB2), because at some point in the future, you may get a faster MacBook and the drive or dock will give you a BIG speed boost...

 

[Weaselboy]

I have read everything and am more confused than ever. Hope I get an answer in plain language for an un-geek. I have an older late 2009 macbook. I have a WD my book studio that has over 3,000 pictures stored on it. I need a backup for it. I have to upgrade to Mountain Lion to use Lightroom 5. I don't think I will go to Maverick because of the issues with wd. I read on the site yesterday that even the new update is killing the drives.
Looking at the wd my book studio for $119 at Amazon for my backup of my drive. USB drive
Is that my best solution? I can't figure out the difference between it and the wd my book cloud. NAS drive

Don't let the WD drive issue scare you away from Mavericks if you are interested in moving that direction. There is absolutely no incompatibility between Mavs and WD drive hardware. The problem is with the add on WD software WD provides with the drive that some Mavs users were running. That software under Mavs borked the drives.

Any drive I buy, WD or otherwise, first thing I do is fire up Disk Utility and erase the entire drive to get rid of any vendor software. Then just use either Time Machine or your own software for backup.

The difference between the two drives you linked is the first would be attached directly to your computer using USB. The second drive you linked is what is called a NAS (network attached storage) setup. That drive does not attached directly to your computer, but rather would attach to your router with an ethernet cable. Then Time Machine backups would be handled over the network.

The network (NAS) backups are a little slower, but unless you are working with a lot of really large files, after the initial backup the subsequent backups are pretty fast over either the network or USB.

I labelled your links to make it a bit clearer which is which.

 

[MCAsan]

Step one....get a Time Capsule for auto backups. Once that has run for a day and you know you have you internal and external drives all backed up to Time Capsule, migrate to Mavericks.

And as stated above, never use funky software from a disk maker....format and partition via disk utility.