I wanted to get people's opinion on whether to get a 3tb Seagate expansion external or the 3tb Seagate backup plus external? I plan on using it as a backup to my computer storage. It will be a cloned drive for my ssd and internal hdd. Then taken offsite only to be back up to every month or so. I know there is a slight price difference for the backup plus and it has a 3yr warranty versus 2yr. What do yall think?
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Seagate expansion or Seagate backup plus?
- Thread starter Bbafett
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In general, anything useful needs to exist in two places and anything important must be in three places. Pretend your computer died one day; how much would you lose? It seems that you would be backing up your files once per month, does that give you enough protection?
All hard drives can fail. They haven't made a drive yet that is guaranteed to last forever. I personally prefer the hard drives that offer five year warranties as I feel they are put together a little better. The external drives usually do not use the SATA connector internally so if the enclosure breaks, you cannot simply just remove the drive and out it into a different enclosure.
In my opinion, a backup once per month seems inadequate. If you can, have two external drives and keep one offsite while backing up to the other one. Then swap them once a month.
Have you looked at using a backup system that is not a clone of your drives? I ask because each clone will take a while. If you used an incremental backup system then every backup after the first backup should be quicker (unless you generate 3 TB between backups).
All hard drives can fail. They haven't made a drive yet that is guaranteed to last forever. I personally prefer the hard drives that offer five year warranties as I feel they are put together a little better. The external drives usually do not use the SATA connector internally so if the enclosure breaks, you cannot simply just remove the drive and out it into a different enclosure.
In my opinion, a backup once per month seems inadequate. If you can, have two external drives and keep one offsite while backing up to the other one. Then swap them once a month.
Have you looked at using a backup system that is not a clone of your drives? I ask because each clone will take a while. If you used an incremental backup system then every backup after the first backup should be quicker (unless you generate 3 TB between backups).
I don't generally change files on my MacBook. I generally use it to play games online that don't save locally. That is about it on a routine basis. I am just looking for a comparison of the drives.
I use ccc for incremental clones so they don't take too long after the first one.
When buying an external drive for a Mac, never buy anything that comes with auto backup, software, LCD status screens, etc. You'll likely use it with Time Machine, so don't pay for things you don't need. Just buy a basic drive, like the Expansion Drive. I am running a 4TB myself for backups.