iomega External Drive Failure

Five years is about the lifespan of consumer grade HDDs. You might want to consider a NAS with RAID.

 

Unplugging and plugging in storage isn't a good long term solution, so much can go wrong.

A NAS is a Network storage device, Apple Time Machine, Synology & QNAP are excellent.
RAID is a redundant drive array, often two or more drives in an enclosure designed if one drive fails you can pull it out and drop in a new drive and the array will rebuild itself with no data loss.
I use a Synology www.synology.com

 

Yes

Hard drives are mechanical devices and they wear out. It's not about if but when.

No

What's needed is a BACKUP.

RAID isn't a backup. Yes, a RAID setup may survive a disk failure, but it won't survive an accidental deletion, OS glitch, power glitch, flood, theft, fire or any number of other problems.

Everyone needs a backup... or preferably two - one in a different location.

 

Agreed RAID isn't a backup. I use DropBox and iCloud for that sort of thing.

 

That can't account for much of your data though...

I strongly believe that RAID is a waste of money for most home users. It seems like a nifty technical solution to disk failure - but it brings it's own problems (especially RAID 5 and Drobo), it costs more, and it fails to address a heap of other risks. Most dangerously, it lures people into a false sense of security as they think they no longer need to backup.

Much better to spend that extra money on a couple of drives to do a real backup.

 

I've got a pair of Synology 110j NAS's, one's here and the other at a friends house. They sync over the internet (feature built into DS 3.x). The 110j also acts as a Time Machine for automatically backup up our Macs.
I did the initial sync locally so it wouldn't take forever and chew through our already limited bandwidth.
I've also got a USB drive locally on my 110j doing Sunday backups.
Another neat trick is Synology has a Time Machine type backup of it's own so it can do Time Machine like backups of its own data.
My browsing, email, notes, calendars and contacts are backed up in iCloud. Handy stuff.

 

I have to agree with this. Unfortunately, a lot of consumer users look at raid solutions as something that will be completely unbreakable. This, as a lot of network administrators can tell you, is a big falsehood.

Probably the safest way for consumers to cost-effectively backup their hard drive is just to buy couple of drives and switch where you are backing up your data on a weekly basis. That way, you always have at least one copy of a backup that is less than one week old.

You can typically scheduling backups to take place at night as well so that you don't even notice them.