Best hard drive for Macbook backup?

knightstyle

The title says it, I have some Amazon vouchers to use and need a reliable external hard drive.

debitcardmayhem

There is no such animal, no hard drive is reliable. Someone may suggest WD another may say Samsung another may say Iomega .... the question should have been phrased "What do people recommend for AMOUNT-in-POUNDS priced HD for my Macbook (USB/FireWire/Thunderbolt) ?"

Im_just_careful

The simple answer is the Apple product for the purpose, the "time capsule".

It may not be the best value but it will be "the best".

I assume you want to use "time machine", see

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1427

Otherwise buy a USB hard disk and let Time Machine do it's stuff.

securityguy

Im_just_careful wrote: »

The simple answer is the Apple product for the purpose, the "time capsule".

Actually, I'm not sure that's the case, even though I've owned a couple of Time Capsules and I'm a big fan of Time Machine. The Time Capsule doesn't use the same format on disk as a USB drive plugged in to use Time Machine (it's a sparsebundle, rather than separate files), and my experience is that it's a lot less reliable. Using a Time Capsule I've had Time Machine decide that the backup is corrupt and therefore demand that I throw the history away and start again, several times; I've never had that happen with USB drives. I've sometimes been able to rescue the backup history with a lot of Unix-man voodoo, but at least once I lost the whole lot.

The problem seems to be the Time Capsule rather than Time Machine over the net. I've now switched to using a 2TB USB drive plugged into one of my permanently running Macs, running OSX Server, and that seems much more reliable.

The hardware is also pretty marginal. The disk drives are standard consumer-grade ones, whatever Apple say, the power supplies are marginal, the drive rarely spins down and the thermal regime inside the enclosure is pretty aggressive. I think my current TC has eaten two disks, and that they're very easy to change isn't much consolation.

The idea of the Time Capsule is great, but the reality is not quite as rosy.

RobTang

Cant say I've had any problems running time machine backing up to a NAS in sparsebundle format.
Then again I've never had to actually restore my mac, so it might be entirely worthless.

The pure fact the time capsule is a single drive device for me makes it a not very suitable device to store backups on.

securityguy

RobTang wrote: »

Cant say I've had any problems running time machine backing up to a NAS in sparsebundle format.

Exactly. I think it's the TC, not the sparebundle format, that's the issue.

The pure fact the time capsule is a single drive device for me makes it a not very suitable device to store backups on.

Well, it depends on what you're using the backups for. It's perfectly reasonable to use a single disk for disaster recovery backups, because you've got a separate copy of the data on the primary system. If you're going to use multiple drives, it makes more sense for them to be geographically diverse rather than mirrored, and that is before you consider than mirrored disks will corrupt in perfect synchronisation if the software or hardware driving them misbehaves. If you're using the backups for something more long term, then storing them on a mirrored system might make some sense, but I'd still rather have two copies on separate systems than one copy with disk mirroring. Fortunately, OSX 10.8 at last supports multiple destinations, so you can run multiple TM repositories and round robin them.

knightstyle

OK, Thanks for all the replies, as the Macbook is now 5 years old, Intel Core 2 Duo 2.13 GHz and when I updated to Mountain Lion the system crashed soon after so I think I will stick with the 10.6.8 which works fine for me.
I have been saving pics, docs onto memory sticks but should i now get this Western Digital 500GB My Passport Portable Hard Drive for Mac at £55
or is this as good WD Elements 500GB Portable Hard Drive USB 3.0/2.0 - Black at £39.99?

securityguy

knightstyle wrote: »

OK, Thanks for all the replies, as the Macbook is now 5 years old, Intel Core 2 Duo 2.13 GHz and when I updated to Mountain Lion the system crashed soon after so I think I will stick with the 10.6.8 which works fine for me.

One huge advantage of 10.8 (Mountain Lion) is the ability to back up to multiple devices.

I have been saving pics, docs onto memory sticks but should i now get this Western Digital 500GB My Passport Portable Hard Drive for Mac at £55

So far as I can tell, the "for Mac" just means that it comes pre-formatted with HFS+ so that Time Machine will work properly out of the box. The days of Firewire being preferred for OSX are long gone, other than for really elderly hardware (mostly PowerPC based) which had rubbish USB.

Given it takes thirty seconds to use Disk Utility to re-format the drive, then

or is this as good WD Elements 500GB Portable Hard Drive USB 3.0/2.0 - Black at £39.99?

seems like fifteen quid you could spend on wine instead.

knightstyle

Thanks again, will order that one and get a takeaway to go with all the wine we have just brought back from France.

almillar

'for Mac' probably just means it's been formatted for you. Buy £40 one and format it in Disk Utility as MacOSX Jounalled. 3 minute job.

knightstyle

It arrived this morning and as you said was very easy, just plug in, erase and use as time machine backup. Great advice again from MSEers.