Mac back up drive? What to choose...
2I have an older (512gig and likely at least 6 years old) Mac back up drive that is small enough it wants me to delete everything to deal with backing up the OS upgrade I just did. Nope not happening. Especially since my 6 year old macbook air is on its last legs (screen is dying and expensive to fix) so don’t want to risk it.
I have been reading reviews of “best mac backup drives” and there seems to be little agreement (I started to make a chart and gave it up because of that).
Probably be wise to get something 1TB to 2TB. I don’t care about speed as much as quality and reliability. Be nice if I could use it on both Mac’s and PC’s but not critical. I do have one PC back up one that I use when I am stuck using a PC (like when I have a work computer at work) and then to get files I need off of that to my mac play the flash drive transfer game.
Which brands are most reliable? Least reliable? Is there anything I need to know about buying one now since my laptop is old and likely I will have to buy another one in the not so distant future (unknown if a used or new one - depends on my finances and job situation).
My computer keeps telling me I have stuff on it that won’t be compatible with some 64 bit change. I have no idea if my entire computer (mid summer 2013) is that or the other 32 whatever it is. Probably be wise to get one that will work with future macs even if I have to get an adaptor now.
Any help/suggestions appreciated.
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In my experience in IT, I’ve had nothing but trouble with Seagate and good luck with Western Digital. I had a Seagate drive that actually interferes with USB3, rendering it useless unless I hid the drive under some books! I just recently got a t 3TB Western Digital from Costco for less than $100.
@canuk One of the reviews had said that Seagate made low end drives, but then some other reviews recommended some models so I had no idea what to think.
@Kidsandliz as someone else mentioned, you don’t need a “mac edition” of anything, they can be formatted either way these days. It seems like the problems I’ve had surfaced early, (usually within the return window), so I’d just give it a week or two before you delete the thing you’re backing up from. For the super paranoid, you can back up your back up, get two drives. The extra money might be worth the peace of mind
@canuk Not that paranoid. No money to be that paranoid anyway. I’ll park all files I’ve saved since the last backup on the old drive. Then do a backup on the new one and let it sit for a while. What is going bad on my laptop is the screen, not the hard drive so the risk is less.
@canuk @Kidsandliz
I’m paranoid enough to have a Synology NAS for local backup and Backblaze B2 for online backup. Plus an external SSD that’s big enough to clone my system drive, so I can boot from it without tearing my hair out.
@TheFLP Except for one catastrophy where my drive failed slowly and so each backup was more and more trashed (so I basically lost everything) I really haven’t had major drive problems. Yet. I’ll keep files on the old backup and the entire mac drive on the big back up drive. Since I have barely anything on my computer with respect to programs I’ll likely be OK.
/image knock on wood
@Kidsandliz
Backups can get corrupted sometimes without physical damage to the drive — you still have to start over, but the HD itself may continue working. That’s the biggest problem I’ve had with backups, and with just about every backup program I’ve used.
Some are better than others at communicating that to you. If there’s an option to email failure reports, I always use it.
@canuk @Kidsandliz I would strongly recommend two backup drives. But don’t backup your backup, if something goes wrong with the first backup, you’re only backing up corrupt data on the second backup.
Do two separate backups instead.
@blaineg I’ve already been burned by backing up a slowly dying hard drive and so nothing much on the original drive nor the back up drive. Sigh. I can use my older drive to manually back up files only and my newer one to back up the whole nine yards.
I have a 2 TB WD external that’s been running automatic Time Machine backups for 4 years now, never had any issues with it, and I’ve done a couple complete restores from it as I’ve updated desktops. I have it partitioned as 2 drives, one 0.5 TB that I use for manual archiving and the rest 1.5 TB where the auto backups go. It has connections for everything (USB, Ethernet, Lightning, Thunder, partly cloudy, even (gasp) Firewire, and drivers for machines and OS versions that go back quite a ways (I can hook it up to my ancient Mac Book Pro, which only runs OS 8, and it works fine). I’m looking at investing in some mapping and graphics packages that will choke out the 2 TBs, and I’ll get the same unit with more storage.
I tried a networked unit and couldn’t get it to work properly and continuously or quickly enough - sometimes a wire works better and I like the comfort of it sitting there next to the computer winking at me.
/youtube automation allan sherman
@stolicat I
Allan Sherman. He died way too young.
@stolicat and I should mention the WD units can be configured for Mac and/or PC.
@Barney “Sarah Jackman” and “Harvey & Sheila” are two of my favorite all-time.
@stolicat Eight Foot Two, Solid Blue, You’re Getting to Be a Rabbit With Me, Headaches – I could go on and on.
@stolicat
@stolicat Sounds like 2 votes so far for WD.
I’ve used a couple of drives at work, a Seagate Backup Plus and a WD My Book. No complaints with either of them, and you don’t need to buy a so-called “Mac version” of anything.
I haven’t had a hard drive die on me in a long, long time, especially the 3.5-inchers.
A six-year-old Air would have USB 3.0 ports, which is more than fast enough for spinning hard drives. And a USB 3.0 hard drive is pretty much universal — at worst you’ll need an adapter for the USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 ports on newer Macs, and future PCs will have at least one old-style USB 3.0 port until the sun burns out and the Goat Void consumes everything.
@TheFLP Thanks for info on the standards. I hadn’t done reading on that. One of the ways I keep my “I wants” under control is to just plain not read about things I know will trigger the “I wants”. For example I want a large screen monitor or desktop with a which would make grading easier and faster if I could keep 3 files completely visible at once… but not in the budget so I stay away. The downside of course is that it takes more work to research stuff when something turns into a need.
@Kidsandliz Here’s another way to keep wants in check. Look at what Apple just introduced, and laugh yourself silly over the $1000 monitor stand.
I think the best response I’ve seen was from MSI.
@blaineg OMG!!!
Is there much practical, for my purposes, differences between the different drives WD makes?
@Kidsandliz
If you’re talking about their external drives, choose the My Book over Elements. You may not care about the extra software features, but the My Book has a 3 year warranty vs the 2 year warranty on the Elements.
Things get more complicated if you’re piecing together a bare (internal) HD and an enclosure. Black or Blue, 7200rpm or 5400rpm … most of which doesn’t matter for a basic backup drive.
@TheFLP Thanks. All I am doing is looking for your basic back up drive without anything fancy, self created, etc. certainly the longer warranty seems like a good idea.
@Kidsandliz @TheFLP Pretty much what I would recommend. Either the My Book or Element - the latter is cheaper and simpler, the former has more software geegaws and a better warranty and costs a bit more. I think for your application, the usefulness of either will be identical.
I did also check on the current version of the Element, and it only has USB 3.0, not all the different interface options my older one has. Again, probably not relevant in your case.
I would buy two drives. Use one to backup your current hard drive, and use the other as a second hard disk for extra space. Just buy what’s cheap and popular online.
/giphy cheap and popular
@eonfifty Well so far I have only used a bit over half of my computer’s 500gig drive so it will be a while before I need more space. I can use my soon to be old backup drive as extra space once I have a bigger, new one.
I have 5 WD drives humming along happily plugged into my Macbook Pro. Never had an issue with any of them.
@Collin1000 More endorsements for WD. Sounds like this is the brand to get.
When it comes down to the actual hard drive, there’s really only three brands of mechanical hard drive: Seagate, Western Digital (WD), and HGST (Hitachi Global Storage Technologies). Nowadays, WD owns HGST, but WD and HGST drives are still made differently. (Toshiba still makes some hard drives, but they’re hard to find outside of Toshiba computers, and not very good.)
Every other brand uses one of those three disks inside. The electronics that connect the drive to USB, FireWire, or Thunderbolt may be different, but not the drive itself. (HGST drives can be found in G-Technology devices, as that’s a brand owned by HGST/WD. LaCie is owned by Seagate. Other brands buy mechanisms from those three. )
There’s a company that uses consumer hard drives to power a cloud-based backup company. They buy a lot of disks. They also release statistics. They’ve found that HGST drives are the most reliable, followed fairly closely by WD, with Seagate trailing a good bit behind. However, in recent years, they’ve found Seagate’s quality improving.
The very best thing you can do, though, is understand that hard drives have a finite life. For traditional mechanical hard drives, there’s moving parts inside that will wear out. On average, a drive will wear out after about five years. So, if you’re using it to back up critical data, plan to replace it every four years. You may still have a failure… but you’ll lessen the chance of a statistically likely failure from old age.
You can also connect two hard drives to your Mac and configure both in Time Machine. Your Mac will then alternate between them for backups. If one fails, you’ll lose one backup, which has a 50% chance of being the most recent backup. If you do this, buy two different brands of disk. That way, if one drive fails because of a manufacturing defect, you won’t have to worry that the other one came from the same defective manufacturing batch.
@Kidsandliz – Sorry I’m late for chiming in, but I’ve been traveling.
Considering the age and, likely, small-ish size of your existing MacBook’s hard drive, why not get an SSD in an external case and use that as your Time Machine backup?
This is what I’ve done; I’ve scored a 1TB SSD on the cheap (<$100) and a cheap external (USB) case, and I’m set.
Speed is as good as USB gets, and the one thing I don’t have to worry about is mechanical failure. (I can’t count the number of times over the years I’ve taken a drive off the shelf and it won’t spin up or seek or something. SSD avoids this whole problem.)
Something to think about, anyway. The one thing you never want to have happen is that your backup drive fails when you need it for a recovery!
Backblaze is the only company I know of that publishes actual drive failure data on a regular basis. Google did a one time dump years ago, but has never provided an update. As of March 2019, Backblaze had 106,238 hard drives, so that’s a good pool of data.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q1-2019/
Backblaze got creative during the 2011-12 hard drive shortage. I like the way these guys think.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze_drive_farming/
@kidsandliz In addition to the drive, I’d seriously consider Backblaze’s service- $6/month will give you a off-site backup for everything on your computer. Just set it & forget it.