External hard drive

[Mr. McMac]

I have 3 Western Digital Element External HD's for about a year now. Never had any issues. As a matter of fact, I haven't had any issues with any Western Digital I've owned over past several years. I think they make the best drives.

I figured I'd try something new so I purchased a 2gb Seagate Expansion a few weeks ago from newegg for $79.99. So far it's been great. Time will tell.

 

[cube]

I live in Belgium and you can only get a handful of enclosures over here, 90% of them only USB. Macally is one of them, but even the older enclosure with USB2 and FW800 (NO USB3) is still way more expensive when you add a 2Tb HD to it (the enclosure alone almost costs as much as the WD of Lacie drives)...

Well, you were showing amazon.co.uk links and you can get the case I mentioned there from a third-party seller, only a coupe pounds more than from some specialized UK site. They can also be found in other European countries.

One thing to look at with the ready made external is the speed of the drives, I think some of the 3.5" use 5400 RPM mechanisms.

A ready made solution that can be acceptable given the interesting price, are the Seagate GoFlex drives or whatever they are called now. I have bought a couple of the 2.5" given that there are a variety of swappable interfaces to choose from for a reasonable price.

 

[Fishrrman]

"Do you have any Suggestions for speeding up this process. I am happy to buy a high-speed external drive don't know which one would be fastest. Should I be looking for USB or FireWire? is there something specific I should be looking forward to determine the highest speed?"

My strongest suggestion would be to NOT rely on "cloud" backups.
Instead, create and maintain your own "hold-in-your-hand" backup.

Backing up 100gb of data is easy if you have the right equipment, and won't cost you much at all.

You shuttle back and forth between several locations, is that correct?
Do you take your computer along (i.e., laptop), or do you work with a _different_ computer at each location?

Probably the easiest way to stay backed up is to buy (or build, which I prefer) your own external backup drive, and carry it with you. I would suggest something small and portable. A good external case (no financial interest):
http://oyendigital.com/hard-drives/store/U32-M.html
Then just use the 2.5" internal drive of your choice.
A small screwdriver is all you need to put it together. DO NOT BE INTIMIDATED BY THIS (shouting is intentional). If I could do it, you can, too.

I would HIGHLY recommend using either CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper to create a bootable clone of your internal drive. This gives you an exact, bootable copy of your computer's drive. If something happened to the computer enroute, with the backup "in your pocket", all you need is another Mac to keep going. INSTANT bootability and access.

I would also recommend keeping at least one additional backup at the location you are at the most -- or, at the one where you have a "secure place" to store a drive.

For doing this, I like "USB/SATA docking stations", which can be bought for under $30, and use "bare drives" (can be either 2.5" or 3.5", the dock accepts either). To see what I'm referring to, go to amazon.com and enter "usb3 sata dock" in the search string.
A USB/SATA dock can be a VERY handy piece of hardware to have around, particularly if you need to juggle several drives.

Again -- I WOULD NOT rely on "the cloud" in your position, especially if you have data that is important for work that you might need to access quickly.

 

[ColdCase]

I recently lost all of my data and I'm trying to restore from Carbonite. I was restoring to a 1 TB external hard drive. However, it is moving at a snails pace. I have been restoring for over a week and it hasn't even restored 1/2 GB.

This is an example of the reason most here recommend to backup to a local hard drive, either one connected to the computer or on your local network. And use on line service only for disaster recovery. Although 1/2 GB seems way off. I would have expected perhaps 10GB with a decent DSL connection.

Anyway, the culprit is your WAN speed, and it doesn't mater which provider you select, crashplan has just as many issues as any other, more so now that they oversold. I have a fast 30up/30 down connection and it still takes a day to backup 100GB, longer if any single file is more that 6GB.

On line backups are more suitable for situations where your house may be destroyed and you need to rebuild. They are also OK for small amounts of data.