reliable hard drive back-up for IMac?

[chris dees]

I'm using a 6Tb LaCie D2 (still thunderbolt 2 tho) as my main backup, it has a 128Gb SSD as well.
Once a month I copy that one to two 6TB Toshiba HDD's, one of them is kept outside the house.
I would love to have cloud backup, but for an amateur it's too expensive for my taste.

[CS]

I have an IoSafe  for normal backup that appears to be failing. I also periodically back up on a G-Force that I keep off-premises. The IoSafe has been backing up every hour for several years. Any recommendations for a reliable replacement? Thank you.

What sort of backup, files, TM (Tome Machine), bootable clone? What OS are you running? For bootable clones, the latest, MacOS 10.15, Catalina, requires an SSD, but TM backups should go to spinners (HDDs). If you're just backing up images, either type of drive will serve, and triple redundancy is not out of line.

I like to use external enclosures that allow me to hot swap drives at will. That allows me to copy drives and/or replace any that fail, at will, and continue to use the enclosure. I hate sealed enclosures that don't allow access and/pr replacement of the drive itself. It's less expensive to buy naked drives than it is to buy enclosures with the drive sealed inside, plus you get a much wider choice of drives to choose from.

Buying naked drives also eliminates the software that comes loaded on packaged drives in sealed enclosures. There is good software out there for backups, such as CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner), as well as other SW choices. The Mac has it's own TM backup software, and I would recommend a drive used for TM to be restricted tp TM exclusively due to the speed with which it can fill up the available drive space.

[Mike G]

Don’t forget the that Time Machine will overwrite the earliest backup with the latest backup! And of course you can restore a Mac from a TM backup!
It’s how I have populated a new iMac!

[HCS]

I like the concept of "Crashplan" Planned contingencies ....

With today's SSD drives, the death of a drive is like a silent blow from a Cyberspace Deity without any warning. A failing HDD might make funny noises before it takes upon itself to die.

Jottacloud is a Norwegian company i believe, might be interesting (i choose it (via the Dutch Liveschijf company) to have my data also in a Eur data center). Also it is mucho faster than Crashplan (under 5TB backed up data).

I surmise I'm a nerd as well. All those RAID-1/5/6/10 systems tell me something. A transnerd??

 

[Jack of all trades]

Thanks to all of you for your insights. I appreciate it very much.

Best wishes from Jack Seaman

[Jan Anne]

For my MacBook Pro with a 500GB SSD I have two Samsung T5 SSD USB-C 3.1 drives of the same size, with SuperDuper I periodically make bootable backups so I can continue using the MBP when the internal SSD dies.

When I travel I take one of the super small T5 drives with me which is stored in a separate location whenever possible, usually it goes with me when the laptop stays behind in the car, camper, hotel, etc.

At home I have several mechanical drives of different ages and sizes where I keep 3 copies of all photos spread out in different locations. I do have iCloud for file backups but as I am connected to the World Wide Web over a 4G mobile connection my speed and data is rather limited and not suited for photo backup.

I recently noticed that one of my 1TB drives was starting to fail, luckily I could restore it but I don’t trust it anymore as my main photo backup drive and as it was approaching its max capacity it was time to move to something more current and bigger.

When checking all the drives of different ages it was apparent all of them had different power adapters and data interfaces, as I did not want to add yet another power brick or cable type into the mix I decided to “make” my own drive using a 2TB M.2 NVMe SSD in an Asus USB-C 3.2 1GB/s enclosure where the latter can be replaced in the future when new interfaces like USB 4 comes available on the market.

Initially I was looking for a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure to use the full 3400MB/s speed potential of the SSD on the MBP but I kept reading stories about them not working at all with my iPad Pro 12.9 2020 which is currently limited to 335MB/s import and 100 MB/s export speeds anyway, hopefully Apple will bring the speed to the max 1000MB/s of USB 3.2 in iPadOS 14.

Attached a photo of the inside of the Asus enclosure, solidly made of thick aluminum which together with the pre-installed thermal tape keeps the temperature at a maximum 45C even on hot summer days of 30C (like the past few days here) which prevents throttling of the SSD inside.