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Need help for external hard drive
- Thread starter design27
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Amazon or a store like Microcenter, among others, is where you want to go. That is where you can purchase such drives. Toshida, Western Digital, Samsung, Seagate are all fine for backups. Get one with a capacity that is at least as large as the device you are backing up. However, that said, it is better to go with at least double the capacity, which will eventually be used up with regular use of Time Machine or possibly Carbon Copy Cloner depending on whether you save deleted files, etc.
I second what @Madhatter32 said. I would only add that you should have no less than 2 different backups of the same data (if at all possible). If your backup drive fails and that is the only backup you had, you have lost valuable files.
If budget allows purchase 2 backup drives and or consider using a cloud based storage option in addition to a physical drive like the ones MadHatter mentioned.
If budget allows purchase 2 backup drives and or consider using a cloud based storage option in addition to a physical drive like the ones MadHatter mentioned.
Thank you for your reply. I am very confused due to compatiablity. On apple site they told be to be sure to pick one that is compatiable with the MacBook pro mid 2012 (not retina) but none of them are listed on their site with this model.
I believe that Apple is referring to SSDs -- not certain though. I think they changed to the proprietary M.2 SSD drive for the retina models.
Wasabi charges $6.65 / TB and is much easier to retrieve files from, in my opinion. And Wasabi also offers the Immutable backup option.
There is no such thing as "Mac Compatible" when it comes to external disks (although some companies want to sell you that). If it's USB, it will work on every mac. Most external disks come preformatted with either NTFS or exFAT. But you can easily format the disk to HFS+ or APFS on your Mac and use it for Time Machine without any issues.
Just buy a large enough disk from WD, Seagate, HGST or some other reputable brand. Ideally you want 2x the internal disk size. If your internal disk is 500GB, then buy at least 1TB of HDD for backup. That way you can keep enough history.
I have two Western Digital MyBooks and one Western Digital Elements drive. They hold 1, 2 and 8 TB respectively. I think that 4 TB drives are the current sweetspot for cost/GB. I backup to all three of them. HDDs fail eventually and it's random and it is really nice to have a backup to the backup. The paranoid, like me, go for three or more backups with one, ideally, stored off-site. The 1 TB is getting a little small and I may have to replace it with a 4.
The thing about Cloud backup is the amount of time to restore. If you don't have a high-speed broadband service (like DSL) or if you have bandwidth caps, then restoring from the cloud could have some problems. Of course you could go to Starbucks and hang around while you do your restore.