What is your backup situation at home?

[BlueCat57]

i have a 3TB drive for Music, i have 2 x 4TB drives for Movies, i have a 3 TB drive for Documents and Pictures (this drive has FAILED, data lost! some of it backed up)... PLEASE, I would like advice on how to backup my drives preferably clones to external drives or bay enclosure. I have looked into OneDrive, DropBox, etc, they don't really offer a 1-user plan for this much data or if there is a plan this large, it's not really in my budget to pay more than $20/month. I have little to no knowledge or RAID 🙁 but have all the ambition to learn.

I currently backup all my phone photos to Google Photos and Amazon Prime photos, my documents I do and can back them up to OneDrive. Now what's most important to me are my camera pics. I love taking pics. We just had our first born child. I am now also shooting in RAW+JPEG so each picture is very large ~15-20MB. With my Documents/Pictures drive lost, I am now looking to replace it with a 1TB SSD so I will need a backup solution for that. Or if 1TB proves to be too small I may have to go back to an SATA drive, regardless, surely I want to back my pictures up!

Please advise, thanks!

WD EasyStore 8TB today at Best buy for $140.

Don't mess with RAID or clones. Just follow It's plan and rest easier.

Wow, $160 savings! l've been anti-WD for the past 10 years, but have had 3-4 Seagate drives fail on me, albeit been thru many power outages.. Perhaps it's time to give WD another chance. Thanks for the info, I'll be checking it out!

edit: what's the difference between the easystore & My Book, just the included cloud storage?

My advice was to follow the OP's plan. auto-correct changed that.

The EasyStore is BestBuy's "generic" drive from WD. I'm pretty sure that it needs external power and doesn't come with the same software as the MyBook. The price is a "door buster" deal so you need to buy it today to get that price.

If I remember correctly I reinitialize the MyBook I bought and use Windows' built-in backup for backups. The OP uses a more advanced software. You may want to start with the "free" software and then slowly upgrade to the fancy stuff.

I've slowly added backup drives for my systems. At some point I'll probably have two for my "critical" files so I can keep one at home and one off-site. Currently I store my drive in a water and fire resistant lock-box. You can get one for around $40 if you're patient. I've bought these for about that: SentrySafe Fire Safe, Fire Resistant File Safe, 0.61 Cubic Feet, 1170BLK. You can fit a couple of external drives and a bunch of hanging folders in them. You can't immerse them in water but as long as they are upright water won't get in.

 

[popatim]

I have to hit up that deal myself. I dropped one of my external drives today 🙁

[edit] In for two. LoL

 

[The Original Ralph]

Gzy - what others have said plus what i do - i render a lot of videos. With the time to render, edit etc running usually 1.5X the time of the video file's running time. Every file i rendered gets copied to 2 different hard drives, 1 to a bank of 4TB WD HDDs, not set up in raid, in what i believe is called JBOD or Just a Bunch Of Drives, and the 2nd copy goes to a bank of seagate 2TB Slim Backup HDDs which are just 2.5" laptop HDDs in USB enclosures. Main reason i use those, we have an RV that space is at a premium so the smaller drives, being more compact are easier to store and store more of them when we go on the road.

But point is, that image in USAFRet's signature - that's there for a reason, that is the reality (for me anyway) in the realm of computers. Every one of my 4TB HDDs is cataloged so if one goes south, i know what was on it and which 2TB drives to copy back to a new 4TB drive.

I've been leary of going to HDDs larger that 4TB but damn if that price on that 8TB WD drive isn't attractive. If you look around on the internet, Seagate's quality seems to have gone down considerably the past few years - a lot of folks pretty upset with them. I've been running WD HDDs now for about 5 years and haven't had one go south yet

 

[Gzy]

I appreciate the responses! I picked up the 8TB WD Backup from Best Buy, THANKS AGAIN! Fry's also had a 4TB WD HD w/promo code for $99 and I picked 2 of those up as well! I think i'll put the 2nd 4TB in an external USB enclosure and use it as a file copy backup and also backup to the 8TB drive, hmm...

 

[popatim]

I bought 2 of the 8tb drives.
TY BlueCat for pointing out the "Doorbuster"!
Backups ran when I got home and no issues with either drive.