HDD or SSD for backup purposes?

AnotherJoe

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?

It doesnt matter since as said you should have at least two plus another kept offsite be that physical in another location or in the cloud.
The saying goes something like "your data doesn't exist unless its been backed up 3 times"

Relying on just one single device / method to get you out of trouble will bit you in the posterior one day.

AnotherJoe

Tom99 wrote: »

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.

Mirror is not backup. In some ways its worse than not doing it as it makes you think you've backed up w hen you haven't.

Tom99

AnotherJoe wrote: »

Mirror is not backup. In some ways its worse than not doing it as it makes you think you've backed up w hen you haven't.

[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]I don't understand that comment. Mirror means you have an exact copy of all you files on a removable drive, so just what you need if your hard drive fails, laptop is stolen or you need to reinstall the OS.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]Why would that be worse than doing nothing?[/FONT]

economic

AnotherJoe wrote: »

It doesnt matter since as said you should have at least two plus another kept offsite be that physical in another location or in the cloud.
The saying goes something like "your data doesn't exist unless its been backed up 3 times"

Relying on just one single device / method to get you out of trouble will bit you in the posterior one day.

does the 3 include the original or is it 3 on top of the original?

bsod

if it is a 'saying', it's a dumb one, because it's clearly nonsense.

keep it simple: one original, one (or more on your pen drives) backups on usb hard disk (not ssd). Safely remove and detach the backup drive when the backup has finished. It will probably outlive you unless you drop it .. and if it doesn't, you still have the original, and the pen drives. Next question: macrium (free)/copy&paste/or incremental batchfile.

Asking about brand recommendations from strangers won't elicit a scientific response, but portable drives are handier than full size ones.

economic

bsod wrote: »

if it is a 'saying', it's a dumb one, because it's clearly nonsense.

keep it simple: one original, one (or more on your pen drives) backups on usb hard disk (not ssd). Safely remove and detach the backup drive when the backup has finished. It will probably outlive you unless you drop it .. and if it doesn't, you still have the original, and the pen drives. Next question: macrium (free)/copy&paste/or incremental batchfile.

Asking about brand recommendations from strangers won't elicit a scientific response, but portable drives are handier than full size ones.

Can i ask why not SSD? I was thinking of SSD instead of a HDD.

bsod

on grounds of

cost/capacity - one large capacity hdd can hold many disk images.
limited writes
suitability for the job - this is a backup drive, to be used for a few minutes once a month perhaps, where speed doesn't matter. The same money could be spent on more redundancy rather than more speed.

but, if you have an internal physical boot drive, you could swap that with an ssd and use the old one as a backup device.

economic

bsod wrote: »

on grounds of

cost/capacity - one large capacity hdd can hold many disk images.
limited writes
suitability for the job - this is a backup drive, to be used for a few minutes once a month perhaps, where speed doesn't matter. The same money could be spent on more redundancy rather than more speed.

but, if you have an internal physical boot drive, you could swap that with an ssd and use the old one as a backup device.

i see what you mean and i agree. HDD much cheaper - i was just worried about HDD failure but what are the chances of both backup HDD and internal PC hard drive going broke at the same time?

I might buy an internal SSD and replace it with my HDD which is a bootable drive. But how can i make an internal HDD "external" so it can be plugged in externally and portable etc?

Neil_Jones

economic wrote: »

i see what you mean and i agree. HDD much cheaper - i was just worried about HDD failure but what are the chances of both backup HDD and internal PC hard drive going broke at the same time?

Murphy's Law dictates that if anything can go wrong it will go wrong. Therefore as I said previously you need to back things up regularly and separately from the computer - if you have a break in for example and the computer gets nicked, if your backup drive is next to it it'll probably end up in the burglar's swag bag too.

I might buy an internal SSD and replace it with my HDD which is a bootable drive. But how can i make an internal HDD "external" so it can be plugged in externally and portable etc?

Take it out and put it in a caddy, like this:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/CiT-3-5-inch-SATA-Enclosure/dp/B00647A4KY

Note that you won't be able to boot from the HDD while its in a caddy.

economic

Neil_Jones wrote: »

Murphy's Law dictates that if anything can go wrong it will go wrong. Therefore as I said previously you need to back things up regularly and separately from the computer - if you have a break in for example and the computer gets nicked, if your backup drive is next to it it'll probably end up in the burglar's swag bag too.



Take it out and put it in a caddy, like this:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/CiT-3-5-inch-SATA-Enclosure/dp/B00647A4KY

Note that you won't be able to boot from the HDD while its in a caddy.

Thanks.

So my plan is:
Apart from the original data in the actual PC, i will have two backups, 1 would be a HDD backup and the other a pen drive backup. I will leave one of them at my parents place. I will also backup every few weeks on both the mediums. Does this seem sensible to you?

For the caddy - so i will be able to replace my existing HDD with an internal SSD that i will buy, and use a caddy to enclose the HDD so i can use it externally via USB? Could there be any issues with this, easily damaged, more prone to failure etc?