Backup Hard Drive Storage

[Farnsworth]

What are everyone’s practices when it comes to backing up data from their hard drives. Are you manually doing it onto an external HDD? Do you use a RAID system?

How do you balance between cost effectively doing it while it not being such a manual process?

I have 2 2tb external hard drives and one failed last night. This is really pissing me off as I had so much stored on that drive and I’m not even sure what was on there.

I’ve contemplated getting something like this, but it’s not cost effective at all for the small amount of storage I need.

edit: Why can't we link to Amazon, so dumb....
Search this: TerraMaster D5-300 USB3.0 (5Gbps) Type C 5-Bay External Hard Drive Enclosure Support RAID 5 Hard Disk RAID Storage (Diskless)

 

[dmclone]

I built my own PC about 4 years ago. Here is the route I took.

2gb internal hard drive for games, pics, movies, video's, etc

1gb internal SSD for performance stuff. OS, etc

1gb WD External drive

About once a week I plug in the external drive and it backs up my pics, movies, and video's. I normally leave it unplugged, I don't know why but it makes me feel better.

Everything else is saved in the cloud so if i have to reinstall windows, not a big deal. I use to use Acronis software to do backups but it seemed like more of a hassle to restore from image than just reinstall the OS.

What you're proposing would be complete overkill for me but I've thought about it

 

[NickTheGreat]

I'm not an IT guy, but I'm also worried about losing my data. My dad lost a couple years of pictures when I was in high school, including some of the last years of my grandmother (his mother)

I currently have a cheap little 2-bay Synology NAS at home. It's a RAID setup, and I have it backup to Amazon cloud. It's a paid service, but i think it's only $60 per year for 1 TB. The Synology can auto-sync to that.

I have "trained" everyone in the house to work off the NAS rather than the local hard drives. Which is actually better, since we use more than one computer.

I also bought a few of these little Seagate external drives
Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2TB Portable External Hard Drive

The plan was to also periodically make a manual backup and take off site. Or throw in the safe. Which I think I've done twice in 3 years now . . .