Hey all first time posting.
Looking for a good 10+ TB hard drive for PC(use 2.0) to back up all my videos and pictures. I want a decent reliable hard drive that's been proven to be good and not really die. Budget is no more then $500.
Was looking at the WD Elements Desktop 12TB External Hard Drive at JB Hi-Fi, are these good and reliable drives?
Any help will be much appreciated. Thank you all in advance.
Thank you so much for the detailed reply. Really helpful and will take it all into consideration when buying and setting up. Much appreciated
does ssd suffers from memory loss if not powered for a very long time , like 10 years ?
i remember reading about .. something like nand chip … need electrons… to excite it … or something … lol
Why not backup to the cloud with less chance of failure
Im not sure what the cost is, but depends on value of what your backing up
I've always backed up on my PC and really don't like cloud. Not sure just old school you can say. Thanks
Same until I lost a 4TB Seagate of family photos etc
Yeah hoping that won't happen to me. Have the PC stored in a room on its own trying to avoid misplacement or loss of the HDD
@Bash87: Wrong mentality! One day you'll wake up and the drive is suddenly dead aside from click click click & cannot be read. What then?
Not to be dramatic but we've all suffered this before and it hurts. Don't learn the hard way.
This is my offsite backup box with ~50 TB drives in UK as multi-backups for my Microserver in Aus: https://i.imgur.com/zGpCeZr.jpg
@Bash87: By "lost" I think they mean it died, not that they physically lost it.
Not only are spinny disk harddrives prone to failure, a good electrical surge and both drives will both go at once, or ransomware will encrypt your attached backups along with your main computer. If you're not sticking it in the cloud then the only thing you're securing against is one drive dying and the other not.
@freefall101: Yes.. lost as in clicking and no go…
The ultimate is 3 levels of backup with at least one copy offsite
ransomware will encrypt your attached backups … If you're not sticking it in the cloud
I suspect that if someone has owned your hard disk driver then they can own your cloud backups.
@Diji1: I use Backblaze and OneDrive and both keep 30 days of changes. OneDrive has ransomware detection as well, if it starts seeing a bunch of files change to encrypted ones it'll flick you a warning and stop tracking changes. A restore process becomes easy then - nuke all your drives, reinstall windows, recover from online backups from a date in the past (pre-attack).
If files were just being copied to an offsite server somewhere then definitely, but that's not how most backup services work. If someone manages an attack against Microsoft, Backblaze and me at the same time then they can have my files and I deeply apologise for every bad thing I've said about Mr. Putin, Mr. Biden and Mr. Xi or whichever global leader I've managed to piss off enough to get on their shitlist.
@freefall101: Oh ok get ya now.
This thread has really opened my eyes to cloud now. Seems to be much safer and reliable. Thanks
@Bash87: My house was robbed, they stole all the desktop pcs, laptops and portable hard drives. I wish I had moved to the cloud earlier :(
@Gunther: That's a real d#ck move by those thieves.. PCs and laptops I could understand have good value.. but someone's backup portable drives.. thats just being mean
But what is actually affordable cloud storage backup?
OneDrive is affordable, but they cap you at 1TB.
Google Drive is more expensive. They recent introduced storage limits rather than their original unlimited storage for business customers.
Don't even get me started on AWS S3….
Dropbox/Box.com/etc is out of the question since the above is more cost effective in comparison.
What would you suggest? Backblaze is considerable, but I'm looking to back up a NAS of scuba diving videos (4K/GoPro footage) + family photos (would appreciate to be able to also store the RAWs but I can live with just the JPEGs)…
Honestly, after comparing all the providers, it seems the most cost-effective, viable and worthwhile solution is to find a friend who you can drop a NAS at their house, and then just sync your on-site NAS with the one they'll place in their house.
Would anyone else suggest differently? It's been one of the things on my mind but I really can't see myself spending a couple of hundreds of dollars in subscriptions just backing up videos and photos a year.
It all comes down to how much you value your photos etc.. I have some old family photos from the Queens coronation that my grandfather was involved with, so to me fairly valuable - to anyone else, worth nothing.
In reality most photos I've not looked at in years, so maybe its not worth the cloud price if thats how you see it.
My concern is that these companies like AWS will one day do a Photobucket on people with prices
I've been considering the old NAS (soon to be decommissioned) at a mates place and use a VPN over unlimited NBN for rsync to the new server I have to finish configuring and put the new one in service first though (it is a glorified backup drive for data atm, but has a functional VM on it for MythTV PVR duties weirdly enough recording to the old NAS atm)
Obviously you've gotta have the skills to configure this yourself, though I believe modern NAS units have this ability built in just needing to be configured, unlike my situation where I have to shoehorn it in cause it is an old crap model.
If you're disciplined enough to manually grab and resync the data at regular intervals (weekly) then drop it off to a friend/family member, that "sneakernet" version could work fine too.
The wife's work used to use two old Netgear NV+ as daily backups, where one would be plugged in to auto sync from their server at night, and the other go home with a staff member.
You could hypothetically do the reverse - main NAS/server at home, and two NASes or just big external drives, where one lives under your desk at work while the other is at home syncing & switch them at work daily so one is always offsite. Might be more up front than the cloud services but it'd be way cheaper in the long run if you have that much data to worry about.
I've been considering the old NAS (soon to be decommissioned) at a mates place and use a VPN over unlimited NBN for rsync to the new server
I believe modern NAS units have this ability built in just needing to be configured
Have been considering this exact setup for a while now but am having problems finding out exactly how to do it.
Is there anywhere that you could point me to that would explain the process in relatively simple terms?
Was hoping to be able to have photos etc on my NAS backed up (and preferably encrypted) to a friend's NAS and one drive in his (encrypted) backed up to mine automatically with each of us unable access the other's data.
@Grunntt: Do you mean the manual way, or the brand specific modern way?
If they're both the same brand and relatively new they might have a service for the VPN to link them. The manual way I think you either need static IPs or a DDNS service so they can find each other, but I'm pretty sure the cloud services in the newer ones can do that job for you - like you log on to synology's or whoever's services (possibly same a/c on both NAS units) and they do the DDNS for you and spoon feed you the VPN config, then you just set up the backup jobs however you'd want.
I've got an old crap NAS and a roll my own old recycled PC as the new server, so can't really help you there.
In my situation on the ancient NAS I had to basically "root/jailbreak" it by getting root SSH access and manually installing/configuring OpenVPN. I'm not finished with it but got it working connecting to PIA as a test of the software. Basically you'd have to treat it as creating a VPN via OpenVPN between two linux PCs, but all command line with startup scripting to make it persist after reboots, no X desktop environment stuff to make it easier for a linux noob.
In your situation you'd want to encrypt the files/folder being backed up before it syncs them at all - or the backup job itself might have the option to encrypt it for you, but there could be downsides to that (you might be locked into that brand's ecosystem to unencrypt it later perhaps, not sure).
My mate isn't so computer literate so I was going to blow away my ancient NAS's partitions and make different shares for each of us and simply not give him access to the one with my stuff on it, and let him put whatever he wants onto his share. (he has no backup at all atm, other than Google's auto one for his phone photos, but all the DSLR RAWs of his kids from birth to teens I have no idea if he's done anything - I think his external HDD is for more "linux isos" rather than backup)
@smashman42: Thanks for that - gives me a bit to work on.
I am in the market for a new NAS soonish (probably stick with Synology).
Just trying to work out if it's feasible to do this (and hopefully relatively simple).
I have a friend in Qld who has a DS918+ and is paranoid about losing his photos of his late wife. He already has a pretty over the top backup system but as far as he is concerned - you can't have too many safely stored copies.
So, if I can help him out, whilst also adding to my backup schedule, I was hoping to 'share the load' so to speak. Looks like I need to dive back into the Synology manuals and see what I have missed.
You can still get unlimited storage with Google. Make a Workspace Enterprise account. I pay a bit over $30pm for unlimited cloud storage on this plan, although, I do not abuse this. Like any service it could be modified or discontinued in future but for now, it's not a bad deal.
Depends how much data you have ultimately, at a certain point having a 2nd NAS offsite does become much more economical.
Because unless it's air-gapped it's a copy, not a backup.
When backup hardware is so cheap, why would anyone backup to the 'cloud'?
1) The moment you backup to the cloud, you lose control of your data
2) All cloud servers can, and do, lose data, and there is no guarantee against loss from the cloud provider (all care, but no responsibility)
3) A 2TB is only $80, which can accommodate most personal correspondence, spreadsheets and documents
Cloud storage is not the be-all-and-end-all that a lot of users think
How do you manage data redundancy?
You are not limited to just one backup disk stored remotely.
With cloud storage, you still need data redundancy as there is no guarantee you data will not be lost.
With backups managed personally, you keep control of your data.
No matter whether you opt for a RAID system or a simple duplication (triplication?), you still keep control.
@Forkinhell: Your point 3 suggests people buy a single storage disk for $80 do fulfil their needs. This isn't a backup. I've arranged data recover for several friends who believed this approach, until the disk failed. It's just bad advice.
Looking at these two at the moment
https://www.jbhifi.com.au/products/wd-elements-desktop-12tb-…
And
https://www.jbhifi.com.au/products/seagate-expansion-desktop…
Is the Seagate worth the extra few $$$?
Out if my budget even though it will be great at my place.
Why 12tb? Why not a few smaller drives to give yourself redundancy
if 12 dies, you lose it all.
if you have a stack fo 4's if 1 dies…
Do you actually need 10TB now, or are you future proofing yourself? If you don't need 10TB now, but could see yourself needing that much in the future, I'd REALLY recommend looking into a NAS system with at least 4 bays instead. Yes they're a lot more expensive, because you're effectively buying another PC for the sole purpose of storing files, but NAS drives run in a raid configuration which will mean you have the ability to repair/recover the files if one of the hard drives in the NAS dies. On top of this, NAS' these days are loaded with services that allow you to get them to perform other functions, such as reverse proxy, external access, torrent downloader, cloud backup mirroring, surveillance camera control, etc.
You can get a pretty decent Synology NAS for $409, then you only need to add 2+ drives to it (~$250ish) and you're set with the ability to keep expanding later. There are also cheaper alternatives however you will lose out out software features and hardware reliability with them. I would strongly recommend sticking to 4+ bays though, otherwise you lose 50% of your storage capacity to redundancy, while with 4-bays you can configure it to only lose 25%.
wd element 14tb is $389 with free delivery on Amazon for a while.
That's $27.8/tb, quite okay price but us store.
The best Ozbargainer tip for backup storage both in price/TB and cloud safety is right here.
Office 365 for family costs $119 (1 month free trial) for first year and $129 for future years. It comes with the Office suite PLUS 6 TB of cloud storage by way of having 6 family accounts with 1TB OneDrive storage for each account. That's $21 per TB plus its Cloud storage, oh yeah did I mention you get MS Office as well which can be installed on a total of 25 devices (5 per family account)?? If you need more storage just buy another subscription.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/microsoft-365/p/microsoft-36…
So just split your backups into 1TB lumps and you have the best available option compared to the malaise of all the other things discussed here.
I thought everybody knew this.
Also echo what others have said. Do not use it as main (only) storage of photos - always have 2 copies at least (I have 3).
Hard disks WILL die.
In fact I keep data on multiple smaller drives because when a hard disk dies, losing 2Tb is not as bad as losing 10Tb.
Other than that the suggestions seem sound. I prefer the NAS myself for storage, but if you go that way - if you get a QNAP (Which although I used to recommend, I really can't at the moment) KEEP IT OFF THE INTERNET.
WD Elements or MyBook and Seagate Expansion are pretty much your main choices. Both are fine reliability-wise with anecdotal "best thing ever" and "worst drive ever" for both. No such thing as a drive that doesn't die. They ALL will, so plan for that eventuality.
Employ the 3-2-1 backup rule:
3: Create one primary backup and two copies of your data.
2: Save your backups to two different types of media.
1: Keep at least one backup file offsite.
An SSD will likely last you longer than a mechanical HDD but you won't get 10-12TB in your budget range yet. Maybe consider a smaller one for very important files e.g. pictures only and not videos.