A safer way to backup files other than external Hard Drive?

Keep your life simple!!

You can buy a QNAP or Synology 2 bay (or 4 if you choose). Put two 4/5/ or 6TB Western Digital RED or any enterprise hardrive (stay away from your consumer grade baracuda Seagates) run RAID 1 so your simply going to mirror.

This way you can benefit the optional functionality of a NAS. Access files creating your personal cloud. I'm assuming you have secondary drive in your computer as well.....

Now buy a high quality drive like a WD BLACK or highly regarded HGST drive. Load all of your files to this drive and buy an dock station or hard drive enclosure. Drop it off at your best friends house/ Parents place for off site storage.

Since you have a NAS you have full accessibility of your backed up files. The RAID 1 will be a no brainer mirrored redundancy and if something messes up royally with your NAS you should be able to grab that hard drive and put it in a regular PC to read the files or buy the same brand NAS unit and put those hardrives in there.

Your hard drive you dropped at your Parents/ or friends place is your ultimate offsite backup. It'll take you maybe a hour or so to backup 4tb and your done. Even though I am an Amazon prime member I dont use their cloud service. I just dont have the patience for uploading aprox 5tb to the cloud.

Buying a NAS will allow you to have access of your files in your home effortlessly and I also use mine to upload all of my security video's that I have in my house.

If you have the patience to upload alot of data i'd suggest do alot of research and upload to a cloud. Amazon seems to be a great place to store.

What's a NAS?

Archibald wrote in post #17845308
What's a NAS?

Network drives. Google around, there are many to choose from and they are not that expensive. Real handy if you have multiple people in your house that need access to shared files. Also handy as a backup.

https://en.wikipedia.o​rg/wiki/Network-attached_storage

gjl711 wrote in post #17845311
Network drives. Google around, there are many to choose from and they are not that expensive. Real handy if you have multiple people in your house that need access to shared files. Also handy as a backup.

https://en.wikipedia.o​rg/wiki/Network-attached_storage

"Keep life simple", says AlanU, and then says QNAP, Synology, Western Digital RED, NAS, RAID 1, WD Black, and HGST drive. One could spend a lot of time looking up acronyms and terms that people put into posts.

we live in tech times so some familiarity is assumed the first two are brands he defined a NAS Western digital is a brand of hard drives the black ones is the brands best Raid is just a way of of backing up disck Redundant Array of Independent Disks http://www.pcworld.com …94360/raid-made-easy.html


raid one
RAID 1 RAID 1 writes and reads the same data to pairs of drives; it’s also referred to as mirroring. The drives are equal partners—should either fail, you can continue working with the good one until you can replace the bad one. RAID 1 is the simplest, easiest method to create failover disk storage. However, it costs you a whopping 50 percent of your total available drive capacity; for example, two 1TB drives in a mirrored array nets you only 1TB of usable space, not 2TB.

You may have as many pairs of mirrored drives as your RAID controller allows. And in the unlikely event that said consumer-grade controller supports duplex reading, RAID 1 can provide an increase in read speeds by fetching blocks alternately from each drive.

the idea as outlined previously is d to protect your electronic files in such a way that they will be available if your house burns down or the tech changes so your storage system is not available etc. I suffered a hard drive crash and lost only one vacation set of pictures could have been worse. We all tend to think our hard won pictures will be there spinning on our hard drives. NOT so. I recently went through my dad and moms pictures dating back to the 1920's priceless to me. I want my pictures to be there for my children and grandchildren that takes some education and effort.

"Simple" followed by a paragraph i got too bored to finish...

here's simple.... CLOUD STORAGE...done

dashotgun wrote in post #17845420
We all tend to think our hard won pictures will be there spinning on our hard drives. NOT so. I recently went through my dad and moms pictures dating back to the 1920's priceless to me. I want my pictures to be there for my children and grandchildren that takes some education and effort.

For over 10 years I have brought up for discussion about digital data access continuity of our digital photos, how harddrive interfaces and motherboard buses have both changed multiple times since the mid 1980s, so that if we simply store old harddrives with their data in vaults, we could nevertheless end up unable to retrieve that data! ...even if we (another bad assumption) continue to be able to decode the files...can you get Wordstar files converted via Word 2007 ?!

Some folks respond, "I take the time to migrate my data, as hardware evolves.
I reply, "That's great, but as our data accumulates, it takes us more and more time to move the accumulating mass of data....and do you think your grandchildren will even bother to take the time to continue to migrate your data after you have passed away?!"
If the answer is no, then digital photos are lost to the historians of the world.

Some then say, "Who will care about my photos?!" Well, if you had one of a very few photos of some historically significant event (vs. a snapshot of Uncle Harry passed out on your couch) the answer to that question could be, "There would be lots of interest!"

Archibald wrote in post #17842563
So if you lose everything, how long to restore 2TB from the cloud?

I was going to say that with Crashplan, you can use their optional "Restore to Door" feature where they will overnite you an external HD with your backups so you can be up and running in 24 hours. However, I just discovered that they discontinued this feature as of yesterday, which is a real bummer.

Bcaps wrote in post #17845482
I was going to say that with Crashplan, you can use their optional "Restore to Door" feature where they will overnite you an external HD with your backups so you can be up and running in 24 hours. However, I just discovered that they discontinued this feature as of yesterday, which is a real bummer.

At least they are still in business -- unlike a number of cloud storage service business that have chosen to withdraw from that market, or that went insolvent and vanished without passing on client data to successor businesses that survived!

I've been using Crashplan since the days when the company founder used to email me personally to answer some tech support questions I had. I've no concern for them going out of business. That really isn't a concern of mine for any of the online backup companies as it would only be an issue if they happened to go out of business with no warning on the same day that I had a catastrophic failure of both my live data and onsite backups.

Wilt wrote in post #17845478
For over 10 years I have brought up for discussion about digital data access continuity of our digital photos, how harddrive interfaces and motherboard buses have both changed multiple times since the mid 1980s, so that if we simply store old harddrives with their data in vaults, we could nevertheless end up unable to retrieve that data! ...even if we (another bad assumption) continue to be able to decode the files...can you get Wordstar files converted via Word 2007 ?!

Some folks respond, "I take the time to migrate my data, as hardware evolves.
I reply, "That's great, but as our data accumulates, it takes us more and more time to move the accumulating mass of data....and do you think your grandchildren will even bother to take the time to continue to migrate your data after you have passed away?!"
If the answer is no, then digital photos are lost to the historians of the world.

Some then say, "Who will care about my photos?!" Well, if you had one of a very few photos of some historically significant event (vs. a snapshot of Uncle Harry passed out on your couch) the answer to that question could be, "There would be lots of interest!"

In reality, not that many people in the future will be that interested in the stuff that we treasure so much and that cost us so much to create. I know that, but still keep my files safe and backed up.

Old stuff goes through a maximum peril stage when it is likely to be tossed because it is not old enough to be interesting. Photo albums belonging to deceased people are in that category. A generation or two later, those same albums might be very interesting to some people if they were somehow preserved.

So with that hope, I protect my stuff for future generations to make their decisions.

Archibald wrote in post #17845308
What's a NAS?

In short, Network Attached Storage.

It a small box that sets up your hard drives as a network storage that can be accessed locally via your network, OR via the Web, so you can back up from anywhere. Like a "Personal Cloud" that you can access from anywhere that has internet access or directly when you are at home. A "NAS BOX" is essentially a network server that is arguably easier to set up and use than building an actual server.

That, and the anywhere anytime internet access to back up is the "simple" part.

Archibald wrote in post #17845517
In reality, not that many people in the future will be that interested in the stuff that we treasure so much and that cost us so much to create. I know that, but still keep my files safe and backed up.

Old stuff goes through a maximum peril stage when it is likely to be tossed because it is not old enough to be interesting. Photo albums belonging to deceased people are in that category. A generation or two later, those same albums might be very interesting to some people if they were somehow preserved.

So with that hope, I protect my stuff for future generations to make their decisions.

When I was in high school I took a backstage photo of Janis Joplin, and at another time some photos of Bill Cosby.
My mother has a photo of me shaking hands with Ronald Reagan as Governor of CA, when I was commissioned a Second Lieutenant.
I have another photo of two daughters with Henry Winkler in front of a theater in NYC.
Even so-called snapshots can have significance because of the venue, the timing, or who happens to be in the photo.

CyberDyneSystems wrote in post #17845527
In short, Network Attached Storage.

It a small box that sets up your hard drives as a network storage that can be accessed locally via your network, OR via the Web, so you can back up from anywhere. Like a "Personal Cloud" that you can access from anywhere that has internet access or directly when you are at home. A "NAS BOX" is essentially a network server that is arguably easier to set up and use than building an actual server.

That, and the anywhere anytime internet access to back up is the "simple" part.

OK, thanks. So you would need to set up remote access via the Web. And you would have to manage storage for multiple computers. I guess there would be security issues with this setup, both to keep out prying eyes and to protect your files from viruses.

Not simple, but could be useful to have your stuff accessible anywhere.

Archibald wrote in post #17845517
In reality, not that many people in the future will be that interested in the stuff that we treasure so much and that cost us so much to create. I know that, but still keep my files safe and backed up.

Old stuff goes through a maximum peril stage when it is likely to be tossed because it is not old enough to be interesting. Photo albums belonging to deceased people are in that category. A generation or two later, those same albums might be very interesting to some people if they were somehow preserved.

So with that hope, I protect my stuff for future generations to make their decisions.

I am going through that now. I have become our family's archiver and digitizer. I have boxes and boxes of pictures and albums. At first I diligently digitized all of the images but quickly realized that very few were actually wanted or interesting. Landscapes, cityscapes, vacation type photos, wildlife, still life type stuff has almost no interest. Portraits however are wanted by many. I now very selectively digitize and restore.