Quote:
Originally Posted by Hack&Lube
It's the wrong tool for the job.
They are the same exact thing as desktop drives thrown in a $10 metal box sold at a higher profit margin.
You do not buy an external harddrive for essential backups. Mechanical drives can always fail. The reason you buy them is for convenience. If you get a 2.5" external drive, it's a laptop harddrive inside a metal box and it requires only USB to power it. You only need one cable and not a separate power cable as you would with the larger 3.5" drives.
If backups are that important to you, I would never recommend mechanical backup over burning onto high quality DVD-Rs (a good quailty Taiyo Yuden dye).
USB keys do not have a high failure rate. People are just using them in the wrong way. Just ripping them out without going through the safely disconnect process or pulling them out while an operation is happening (even in the background) can corrupt them. A high quality USB drive or SSD would be more reliable than a mechanical harddrive.
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Or you use a redundant backup system, on top of your external HDD backup, like an online backup (like
Crashplan, which allows yo to back up to another PC in your home or across the internet for free.) or a raid array.
I cant even imagine using DVDs to back up my stuff. I don't have 2+ hours to waste putting in 25 DVD's just to back up 100GB.- Imagine trying to backup a whole TB of data. Even then, a DVD is prone to being scratched if you put it in improperly or drop it as well.
If I was looking for an affordable hard drive to do backups at my house, I would get something like
Vantec NexStar MX Dual 3.5in SATA HDD Enclosure w/ RAID, USB2.0 / eSATA. Supports a hardware raid configuration, and uses 3.5" disks so they are a bit cheaper.