Internal or External Hard drive for backup?

[Premi]

Hi. I currently have 3 drives:
-1TB WD BLUE for random files and games
-120GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD for my OS
-250GB Samsung 250GB EVO SSD for games

I want to get a fourth hard drive to put some stuff in there as backup. I won't be doing a full backup, just certain game saves, school-work, pictures, songs, important documents, etc.

As I already mentioned, I won't be using it daily. Maybe once every 2 weeks i'll copy paste stuff in there.

I just want it to be there so that if anything happens to my primary harddrives, I will still have my important files somewhere else.

So my questions are:

1) In my case, is it better to get an external harddrive, or an internal harddrive?

2) Which will last longer? I feel as if the internal HDD will be more susceptible to harm via virus transfer or burning out from being on all the time than an external HDD.

3) Which internal and/or external HDD should I get, and is there a specific way I have to format it or something?

Thank you for your time.

 

[martinch]

Having a backup drive permanently connected to your PC and accessible is a very bad idea, due to the possibility of your PC getting a virus, and said virus trashing both your PC's HDD and your backup HDD.

An external device that's only on whilst you're running a backup/restore will be fine, and should last for a long time. Just be sure to put it somewhere where you can't knock it over/off (i.e. not on the end of a shelf.. )

Personally, I tend to get an external disk enclosure, and then a regular 2.5" or 3.5" HDD to go in it (e.g. Silverstone TS07B with a WD Green 1TB).

 

[joex444]

Simply because you want to use it intermittently, you are probably better off with an external.

Also, you should really avoid the whole copy/paste manual backup method. There are plenty of free backup utilities that will save an image of your OS drive, allowing you to restore the entire disk and have it be bootable, etc. Maybe you'd be OK with synchronizing, eg, work + music folders over to the backup drive but the copy/paste method won't replicate deletes so you're liable to end up with a lot of junk.

Meanwhile, imaging is often incremental. It'll create a base image of everything as it was when first run, then at scheduled times it will compare what changed and save that. Next time, it will compare to the base image + first incremental backup; so on and so forth so that only changes to changes show up in the 3rd and subsequent backups. It's entirely feasible for a base image to be ~100GB and incremental backups to be 1GB or so and represent several days.

Though if you go with frequent incremental backups, having this on another internal drive is pretty reasonable as it will always be available for a new backup which is much more convenient than remembering to turn your external drive on at noon each Tuesday or some such schedule. Another consideration is to have the backup drive attached to a NAS device or have it be a USB drive shared over a router.

Also worth considering would be to convert your 1TB drive to a RAID1 so that you have a mirror of that, and for your school work using Dropbox/Google Drive/etc. or even if applicable, just using Google Docs natively instead of MS Office/OpenOffice/Libre. If your games are mostly Steam based then IIRC the save points are mostly in the Steam Cloud and the games themselves are redownloadable so if your 250GB drive were to die you'd lose nothing there. If they're not in Steam/Origin, then it's possible that the save points are actually stored somewhere in the C:\Users directory so the image backup of your OS partition would actually handle that. This will clearly vary from game-to-game, but I'd imagine that for the most part you don't need to worry about this.

 

[Premi]

martinch, for some reason it won't let me reply to your response.. When I click " Reply to martinch" it goes to joex444's response, and its as if I clicked " Reply to joex444" .. I don't know what that's about, but I'll reply here and hope you see it.

First of all, thank you for you response! I will definetly do what you said, and get an external disk enclosure, put a WD 1TB Green in it. I will also try to do the imaging thing that joex444 mentioned.

 

[Premi]

I wish I could pick two solutions; you both helped out quite a bunch.

 

[Mint__]

Hi. I currently have 3 drives:
-1TB WD BLUE for random files and games
-120GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD for my OS
-250GB Samsung 250GB EVO SSD for games

I want to get a fourth hard drive to put some stuff in there as backup. I won't be doing a full backup, just certain game saves, school-work, pictures, songs, important documents, etc.

As I already mentioned, I won't be using it daily. Maybe once every 2 weeks i'll copy paste stuff in there.

I just want it to be there so that if anything happens to my primary harddrives, I will still have my important files somewhere else.

So my questions are:

1) In my case, is it better to get an external harddrive, or an internal harddrive?

2) Which will last longer? I feel as if the internal HDD will be more susceptible to harm via virus transfer or burning out from being on all the time than an external HDD.

3) Which internal and/or external HDD should I get, and is there a specific way I have to format it or something?

Thank you for your time.

Some would say using internal hard drives is a bad idea. Some say only to use external hard drives for backup. Still others say use the "Cloud". Personally, I don't like Cloud backup because they gather information you have to agree to in the Privacy Policy --there is no free lunch. As for Internal vs External drives for backup, I use both. I have an older backup program called "WorkStation2" by "EaseUS Todo" that runs off a CD at boot up. It has strong encryption options to protect against theft. Why internal? I keep the operating system segregated from all files. The OS is on Drive 0 Partition 1 and cloned to Drive 1 Partition 1. Files are on Drive 1 Partition 2 and cloned to Drive 0 Partition 2. In other words, C to D and F to E where F is the drive letter assigned to all Files. If the primary drive fails, I simply enter the BIOS and change the boot drive from 0 to 1. After the defective drive is replaced, it's just a simple matter of cloning the OS and Files over to the replacement. The other drives in the system are neither internal or external. Rather, they are mounted on aluminum frames that slide into Mobile Racks accessible just below the CD/DVD drive. The two Mobile Racks I recommend are StarTech SATSASBAY3BK SAS/SATA Backplane and complimented with the SYBA 5.25" Dual Bay Mobile Rack. When leaving the computer unattended, the various backup drives are easily removed from the front of the computer. This along with strong encryption makes it a secure method of backing up.