HDD or SSD for backup purposes?

economic

Hi

In terms of reliability/longevity, which is superior for backups, a hard disk drive or a solid state drive?

Ignoring price and data capacity etc. Just purely based on how long the drive lasts before breaking down, failure etc Given it will be used as a regular (every month) backup, which would be least likely to cause any sort of problem?

Also any brand/model that anyone recommends?

thanks

debitcardmayhem

You need two basically and an offsite solution too, how much do you want to backup monthly? What are you planning to use for Backup do you want to be able to restore individual files ? Too vague a question really

Neil_Jones

economic wrote: »

Hi

In terms of reliability/longevity, which is superior for backups, a hard disk drive or a solid state drive?

Ignoring price and data capacity etc. Just purely based on how long the drive lasts before breaking down, failure etc Given it will be used as a regular (every month) backup, which would be least likely to cause any sort of problem?

Also any brand/model that anyone recommends?

thanks

All other things being equal they should last the same amount of time.
However that being said SSDs when they keel over and die literally die without warning, whereas hard drives tend to slow down.

If something's that important to you that you cannot afford to lose, back it up, back it up and then back it up again. Your backup is only as good as your most recent one. I worked in consumer IT for years and the number of people who didn't bother backing anything up was scary. They only thought about it when it was too late and the drive was already dead.

Most extreme example: Eight years worth of a customer's son growing up and pictures of a partner that had died a couple of years earlier (who apparently "did all this computer stuff") gone. The main hard drive with the pictures died (it was mechanically dead) and it later turned out the "backups" the deceased partner had been doing for years consisted of a bunch of shortcuts to the folders where the pictures were and not the pictures themselves.

economic

debitcardmayhem wrote: »

You need two basically and an offsite solution too, how much do you want to backup monthly? What are you planning to use for Backup do you want to be able to restore individual files ? Too vague a question really

Just simple backup of the same folders every time i carry out the backup - which will be monthly. In total around 50gb of data so not massive amounts. Documents and photos mainly. Purely for the reason of hard drive failure / loss of data on the original.

I was thinking of just one drive. Currently i backup on a pen drive so thought i would have a second as a proper drive. i dont like the idea of having my data in the cloud or anything like that.

thanks

economic

Neil_Jones wrote: »

All other things being equal they should last the same amount of time.
However that being said SSDs when they keel over and die literally die without warning, whereas hard drives tend to slow down.

If something's that important to you that you cannot afford to lose, back it up, back it up and then back it up again. Your backup is only as good as your most recent one. I worked in consumer IT for years and the number of people who didn't bother backing anything up was scary. They only thought about it when it was too late and the drive was already dead.

Most extreme example: Eight years worth of a customer's son growing up and pictures of a partner that had died a couple of years earlier (who apparently "did all this computer stuff") gone. The main hard drive with the pictures died (it was mechanically dead) and it later turned out the "backups" the deceased partner had been doing for years consisted of a bunch of shortcuts to the folders where the pictures were and not the pictures themselves.

Thats a real shame and very sad. I never really took backing up seriously although i do backup occasionally. Time to take things more seriously.

So do you suggest i go for a HDD rather then a SSD?

Uxb

I use 4 Western Digital elements portable USB3 1Tb and 2TB HDD drives.
There are rotated out in sequence for doing the backups and one of them is stored elsewhere.
I've never had one fail - mind you the drives themselves are kept carefully around the house - that means not dropped or slung about, and every time I do a 'safe remove' from the computer via the icon and not just yank out the USB connection, to minimise any possibility of data corruption.

There is a subtle difference between "backup" and "replication" of your data.
Replication is where you have several identical copies of hopefully your up-to-date data. This means of course that you need to copy your data daily. I have a permanently attached USB external drive on my desktop which I use for this. So I have 1 replicated copy.
Then there is backup which is where you have multiple copies of your data as it was at the various times you took the copy. So you might have a copy of your data as it was 1 week ago, 4 weeks ago, 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year etc and you should have multiple copies of each of these. Usually limited by the amount of disk space you have as storage before you have to delete older ones.

Finally around once a year I do a DVD set of the most important data and keep it forever. This sort of guards against a file being unwittingly overwritten and then this overwrite not being noticed. This means the overwrite then gets copied progressively into the backups done over time and after a year the original file will have vanished from all of them.

My PC's get used for my work and for running volunteer social clubs so my backup regime has to rather more rigorous and more like a proper business than you usually find in households.

wongataa

Go for HDD as they are cheaper and have higher capacities. Speed is less of an issue for backups.

scaredofdebt

If you are not doing a lot of writing to it, SSD is probably more reliable as their longevity is based on how many reads/writes you do. This article is of interest:

https://therevisionist.org/reviews/ssd-vs-hdd-one-reliable/

Of course if the data is important you should have 3 backups, one off-site, so both HDD and SDD would be an option (with cloud perhaps for the offsite).

Anecdotally I have had HDDs fail on me but never and SSD, but I have only been using SSD for about 8 years, HDD much longer.

Tom99

economic wrote: »

Just simple backup of the same folders every time i carry out the backup - which will be monthly. In total around 50gb of data so not massive amounts. Documents and photos mainly. Purely for the reason of hard drive failure / loss of data on the original.

thanks

If you use mirror instead of back-up ie just add new or changed files, the amount of disk activity will be very small. I do that once a week for all my files and the copying takes a lot less than one minute since only 50-100 files will have changed in the week.

esuhl

A failed HDD is usually easier/cheaper to recover than a failed SSD. From what I've read (and my experience of HDDs), HDDs are more likely to become temperamental before they fail (giving you a chance to recover data), whereas SSDs are more likely to fail suddenly.

wongataa wrote: »

Go for HDD as they are cheaper and have higher capacities. Speed is less of an issue for backups.

^^ This, too. No need to waste money on an SSD as a backup device.

DoaM

Tom99 wrote: »

If you use mirror instead of back-up

In my mind "mirror" means make the back-up look like the current status ... not good IMHO.

I have a HDD connected via USB and use SyncToy for my back-ups. I have this set to "contribute" so it only writes anything that is new or has changed (same name, different date/time stamp). That way anything that I've deleted from my current folders still exists in the back-up unless I manually delete it.