Which external hard drive can I trust?

[maestrokev]

Having read this, I'm now very confused!

I thought my littel Lacie hard Drive was doing its job.. but now I'm wondering what else I should be doing. All sounds rather expensive!

Jebaloo, I think the problem with external hard drives is that they give you a false sense of security, like how some car drivers believe if you have anti-lock brakes and airbags you can drive faster and take more risks. It's always best to add more redundancy because data loss is no fun and probably more expensive than the cost of adding another drive or online backup solution.

 

[RedTomato]

Having read this, I'm now very confused!

I thought my littel Lacie hard Drive was doing its job.. but now I'm wondering what else I should be doing. All sounds rather expensive!

Simple. Never have only one copy of any valuable data. As a minimum, a BARE minimum, you should have two separate copies of all valuable data, held in two different places.

This is the inexpensive backup strategy I'm using for the charity I work at:

Original - on the desktop/laptop hard drives.
Copy 1 - backed up nightly/ weekly to the NAS (network attached storage) drive (single 500GB drive).
Copy 2 - portable 500GB drive, makes a duplicate of the NAS weekly or monthly, and taken home.

So if the office is burgled or has a fire, or my home is burgled or burns down, or a drive crashes there is still a copy of the data in a different location.

For you, just make sure you have two copies of your data, stored in two different places.

 

[shadowband]

I recently bought a 1 TB fireMAX from proMAX, and it's working fine.

It supports FW400, FW800 and USB 2.0 and comes in various sizes. It ships as a RAID 1, but like you, I wanted redundancy over capacity and performance, so I pulled the jumper to convert it from a 1 TB RAID 1 stripe array to a 500 GB RAID 0 mirror array (the unit actually contains two 500 GB drives internally).

Although this configuration will survive a single drive failure w/o loss of data, there's still some risk for catastrophic failure, as both drives are contained within the same enclosure (i.e. two physically separated mirrored drives would provide additional protection against data loss).

As an added benefit, the style of this drive matches perfectly with a powermac/mac Pro case.

BTW - I bought a 60 GB external FW drive from this company about five years ago, and it's still working fine.

Good luck...