reliable backup solution?

[jeeeet]

I'm looking for a USB 2.0 hard drive to back up data from my T42. I've been looking through many reviews online and it appears nearly all of them are accompanied with horror stories of external hard drives failing.

Does anyone have any recommendations for a reliable external back up solution? I’m hoping to back up 60 gigs+ so I’ve already ruled out cd/dvd burners.

[ZaZ]

I have this case:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6817145329

I picked up a used 40GB hard drive on ebay for around $40. Works great on my T42. I keep all my stuff on my laptop, desktop, external drive and I burn it off onto some DVD+RWs. You can't be too carfeul. Maybe if it your only backup a new hard drive might be a good idea. Good Luck.

[damorg]

Hard drives fail; it's a painful given. For more reliable protection, you need data redundancy which means backing up the data on more than one media target (which means another drive if you don't want CDs/DVDs).

On the systems I administer at work, I have seen failure rates ~5-10% for drives within the first 6 months (this includes "infant deaths" where drives fail w/in the first 72hrs of being spun up). Ouch.

At home, I've had better luck with only a couple drive failures over the last 10 yrs.

Without going to expense of attached RAID storage or the trouble of building a system with RAID to act as a fileserver, your best bet may be to buy 2 (or 3) of whatever USB external drive you choose along with a USB 2 hub.

Plug the drives into the hub and the hub into the laptop. Then, whatever your backup routine is, just pump the data to the additional drive(s) at the same time. (This can be accomplished several ways with various levels of "automation").

For example, at home, I use the Windows Resource Kit tool robocopy to mirror important directories to various locations. The good thing about this is that you only have to update the mirrored directories with changed files rather than doing the "full" amount of data every time.

Hope there's at least something useful for you in my ramble above

Dan

[DavidNZ]

Multiple hard drives feature in my backup routine as well. One is a 1.8" 20GB ,another is a 2.5" 20GB, and the second one is mirrored to my desktop at work.

I don't image my laptop HDD. I figure that, if it dies, it'll be relatively easy to get up and running once I get a new drive.

[GomJabbar]

I've had about half a dozen hard drive failures over the past 15 years on my home desktop computer. I've had one laptop hard drive failure in a 600E that was about 4-years old. I don't trust hard drives much. Especially I don't trust Maxtor drives.

My last desktop computer I bought a little less than 2 years ago was set up with a SATA Maxtor 80 GB raid 0 (2-drive) array. Before the first year was out, both drives failed. I received (2) new drives under the warranty, and although I requested non-Maxtor drives, they would only send me identical Maxtor replacements. I decided to set up these new drives in a mirrored raid 1 array. About 7 months later, one of these new Maxtor's failed. No longer under warranty, I went out and bought (2) new SATA Samsung 150 GB drives, and set them up as a mirrored raid 1 array. So far, these have been running fine.

One note: I discovered that if you try to mirror a smaller drive to a larger drive, the larger drive's available capacity becomes the same as the smaller drive's capacity. Then, even when you mirror the larger drive to an identical larger drive, you still are limited to the smaller drive capacity. I had to make a backup on CD's, then recreate a new (empty) mirrored array, then restore my backup to the array to regain my full hard drive capacity.

[dmdsoftware]

I'm looking for a USB 2.0 hard drive to back up data from my T42. I've been looking through many reviews online and it appears nearly all of them are accompanied with horror stories of external hard drives failing.

Does anyone have any recommendations for a reliable external back up solution? I’m hoping to back up 60 gigs+ so I’ve already ruled out cd/dvd burners.

Why did you find so many horror stories about external hard drives failing? Well, there are two possible reasons:

1) Because the drives are more likely to receive physical damage because they aren't protected by the body of a notebook.
2) Because of hardware write caching. Many drives (my Toshiba for one) implement hardware write caching. I've lost my partition on my drive 3 times to date because of the hardware write caching. Not sure if it's a mix of hardware write caching + Windows + USB.

[dmdsoftware]

I've had about half a dozen hard drive failures over the past 15 years on my home desktop computer. I've had one laptop hard drive failure in a 600E that was about 4-years old. I don't trust hard drives much. Especially I don't trust Maxtor drives.

My last desktop computer I bought a little less than 2 years ago was set up with a SATA Maxtor 80 GB raid 0 (2-drive) array. Before the first year was out, both drives failed. I received (2) new drives under the warranty, and although I requested non-Maxtor drives, they would only send me identical Maxtor replacements. I decided to set up these new drives in a mirrored raid 1 array. About 7 months later, one of these new Maxtor's failed. No longer under warranty, I went out and bought (2) new SATA Samsung 150 GB drives, and set them up as a mirrored raid 1 array. So far, these have been running fine.

One note: I discovered that if you try to mirror a smaller drive to a larger drive, the larger drive's available capacity becomes the same as the smaller drive's capacity. Then, even when you mirror the larger drive to an identical larger drive, you still are limited to the smaller drive capacity. I had to make a backup on CD's, then recreate a new (empty) mirrored array, then restore my backup to the array to regain my full hard drive capacity.

Maxtor drives are the worst. Had some that were DOA, and some that died within a year.

Samsung is a hard drive brand I believe in. I have several still alive after 7 years of service without a bad sector to be found.