Passport WD vs Samsung T3 vs other

[RTheating]

Hey guys!

Brand new to this forum.

I just placed an order for a 27" iMac 3.4GHZ, 512GB SSD, 8GB Ram.

I am upgrading from a mid 2010 27" iMac 3.2 GHZ i3, 4GB ram, ATI Radeon HD 5670 512MB

To say the least I am very excited for the upgrade.

My mac ran pretty well for around 7.5 years. Hard drive did fail once, that was fun.....

I want to make sure I have proper back ups in place for my new one.

1) What external hard drive do you guys recommend. I already have a WD passport (Cannot remember size but likely 1TB), and I have a Nippon Labs hard drive as well. Are either of these going to work ok as a back up? I should not need to access my external hard drive often. The computer is used mainly for work, and is used a lot but nothing crazy like video editing. I do make short videos of traveling with gopro, but the rest is all work files etc. I would like an external hard drive that will work well and ideally back up my computer automatically. I noticed the Samsung T5 is very pricey, the Samsung T3 is not as bad. BUT if you guys think my WD or Nippon Labs external HD will work, I will use one of those as I already have it.
2) Other than the external back up, what is the best way to back up to the cloud or Time Machine? What are the proper steps and procedures to get this in place?

I do not want to run into a situation where I lose my computer info like last time. I had most of it as I had a back up but there were a few months of stuff that was not backed up.

Really appreciate any help.

 

[Samuelsan2001]

Hey guys!

Brand new to this forum.

I just placed an order for a 27" iMac 3.4GHZ, 512GB SSD, 8GB Ram.

I am upgrading from a mid 2010 27" iMac 3.2 GHZ i3, 4GB ram, ATI Radeon HD 5670 512MB

To say the least I am very excited for the upgrade.

My mac ran pretty well for around 7.5 years. Hard drive did fail once, that was fun.....

I want to make sure I have proper back ups in place for my new one.

1) What external hard drive do you guys recommend. I already have a WD passport (Cannot remember size but likely 1TB), and I have a Nippon Labs hard drive as well. Are either of these going to work ok as a back up? I should not need to access my external hard drive often. The computer is used mainly for work, and is used a lot but nothing crazy like video editing. I do make short videos of traveling with gopro, but the rest is all work files etc. I would like an external hard drive that will work well and ideally back up my computer automatically. I noticed the Samsung T5 is very pricey, the Samsung T3 is not as bad. BUT if you guys think my WD or Nippon Labs external HD will work, I will use one of those as I already have it.
2) Other than the external back up, what is the best way to back up to the cloud or Time Machine? What are the proper steps and procedures to get this in place?

I do not want to run into a situation where I lose my computer info like last time. I had most of it as I had a back up but there were a few months of stuff that was not backed up.

Really appreciate any help.

Your current drives should work fine your imac has all the normal usb ports just plug them in turn on time machine and point it to the drive you would like to use as a backup.

You can always use a third party solution like carbon copy cloner this will create a bootable backup so you can run from an external drive instead of the internal if it breaks. This will even allow you to run and restore from time machine for anything not on your bootable backup. Here is a guide

https://www.howtogeek.com/280089/ho...ckup-of-your-entire-mac-on-an-external-drive/

Having both back up solutions and an iCloud account for documents and photos as a third line of defence is always useful.

 

[maflynn]

For backups, I don't recommend a SSD, just seems like its not a good use of your money. SSDs offer incredible speed, but you don't need that for backing up, well not as much as other tasks.

I run off a Samsung T3 (or T5 since they're up to that now), and I recommend that model over other SSDs, but that's just my personal preference.

If want a robust backup solution there are many NAS and DAS units that offer RAID, so you can have data redundancy that should lower the risk of loss for you

 

[Chuck Rodent]

I have poor experiences with the WD drives, high failure rates on their portable drives and OK failure rates on desktop drives in RAID boxes. For backup, a clone of the internal boot drive with the latest version of OS and time machine backups to a RAID 1 box has saved me whenever a boot drive fails. Personal preference for me are the Seagate NAS drives for long term online storage, and their regular Barracuda drive for offline clones.

 

[Fishrrman]

Platter-based hard drives still work fine for backups.

A Samsung t5 might be useful for "additional primary-external storage" or you could set it up as a "secondary boot drive". There's nothing that beats having a second "bootable to the finder" drive for maintenance and those "I can't boot!" moments (that no one thinks they'll ever have, right?).