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I have a home cloud hard drive that was great for about a year. used to back up laptop, desktop, and phones. now i can't get anything out of it. i guess i missed a mandatory update? tech support is no help. so i gotta figure out how to recover my data.

also looking for a new back up option. i don't need fancy. just bullet proof reliability. i don't want to get network certified...i just want to keep my data backed up.

thanks in advance for your time.

I have a home cloud hard drive that was great for about a year. used to back up laptop, desktop, and phones. now i can't get anything out of it. i guess i missed a mandatory update? tech support is no help. so i gotta figure out how to recover my data. also looking for a new back up option. i don't need fancy. just bullet proof reliability. i don't want to get network certified...i just want to keep my data backed up. thanks in advance for your time.

(post is archived)

[–] • 3 pts

The only way you get reliability is with redundancy. Don't just back up to one place, back up to several different drives.

I used to do full compressed backups, but these days I can't be bothered. I back up my personal data, and that's about it. And I don't compress it. The last thing you need when trying to recover data is compression problems. I back up to four different places -- two hard drives inside my PC, a portable 2.5 inch external drive, and a thumb drive. I rotate the backups, which I do manually. It's a chore, but if my primary boot drive crashes, it won't be a tragedy.

[–] • 3 pts

This guy gets it. Reliability comes not from 100% reliable hardware, but a strategy that doesn't rely on any one (or more) drives not failing at the wrong time. Anyone who has critical data on just one drive is counting the days until they lose it all and being faced with the choice between giving up or spending hundreds or more on data recovery.

[–] [deleted] • 2 pts

You can check r/datahoarder on reddit, they do nothing but talk about data storage, configurations and which drives to use.

[–] • 2 pts

Western digital's portable external hard drives are pretty good, up to 5TB and not too pricey. You can carry them around in your pocket. They have the "my passport" line, and the SanDisk "G" drives, which are more ruggedized and moisture resistant. Seems they come formatted for Mac, but if you use Windoze or Linux it's easy to reformat them. They have SSD's too, but more expensive.

https://www.westerndigital.com/products/portable-drives/sandisk-professional-g-drive-armoratd-usb-3-1-hdd#SDPH81G-005T-GBAND

[–] • 2 pts

I have a few of those WD My Passport drives (4TB model). They are good for backups and reasonably fast. I like that they are small so can fit within a fire/flood safe, and don't require an external power supply, so doing a backup is just plugging the USB in, running the backup, then unplugging.

[–] • 2 pts

Yep, and once you unplug them you have cold storage of your backup, not susceptible to attack via any network.

[–] • 1 pt

Also protection from power surges or lightning strikes (the 99% of the time they aren't connected to the computer).

[–] • 1 pt

QNAP NAS like a 2-bay RAID TS-251+

[–] • 1 pt

WD Elements are ok drives. I got VMware Linux servers running on them. I am about to put together another i5 to just power those and put them on network.

[–] • 1 pt

I second this. Elements are the way to go. The passports are 2.5 (laptop drives); they have a higher failure rate. There was also a fiasco with the network attached drives a while back; stay with USB.

[–] • 1 pt
[–] • 1 pt

If you are doing more than one or two; why not just go internal?

[–] • 1 pt

As far as external drives go I'm a fan of the WD Black Game drives. Seagate Expansion also has a decent HDD inside for a relatively good price.

If you want easy... Get yourself a raspberry pi, an external drive and install OpenMediaVault (OMV). Local or public SSH, SMB/CIFS, NFS, FTP, RSync, etc... Perfect for a local backup solution and an easy to use web ui.

https://www.openmediavault.org/

https://forum.openmediavault.org/

[–] • 1 pt

I've had good luck with Toshiba 'Passport' 1 to 2 TB external USB-3 hard disks.

[–] • 1 pt

Ease has a good program one can even buy a USB to sata or ide hard drive adapter and access and pull all kinds of images rebuild them all kinds of cool shit

[–] • 1 pt (edited )

I have had no issues with my Toshiba external drives, and I use them daily for the past decade.

I just checked and my Toshiba external that I'm using right now has 283,239 load/unload cycle count and 17,565 start/stop count with zero errors.