I was wondering if the Western Digital USB hard drives (passports) are any good for long term back ups? http://www.costco.com/Browse/Product.aspx?Prodid=11119342&whse=&topnav=&browse=&s=1 Are they stable? Any increased risk of data loss over CDR or a firewire external hard drive? Any risk of thermal melt if they are left plugged in? (they lack a fan or vents) Anything else to be aware of with them? I like the passport USB system because there's no power cord or wallwart to mess with And their capacity is increasing (used to be 75gig, now up to 125) so they are more useful.
In all honesty hard drive quality has really tanked in the last few years. Drive failure within the first year is something like 1 in 3 now. Many vendors have dropped their warranties to only a year. I would reccomend a Seagate drive. They are a better drive and they warranty their drives for 5 years. Although this doesn't help if the drive crashes and you lose your data, at least you know the company stands behind the quality of their product.
A decent PATA -to- USB enclosure costs less than $30. Fill it with a good Seagate drive and go to it. As long as you don't leave it plugged in and active the drive will last until Doomsday--be it nuclear or magnetic! Best regards, Eric
For any long term hard drive backup I'd at least do a mirrored raid in the computer and if you were keeping that offisite I'd keep 2 and rotate them. For the price it's fairly cheap for the 2 and by rotating they get half the use and you'd be less likely to have both go bad if the main system dies.
That works, too, but if there is a PSU failure or a zap from the phone line/LAN, you could lose the data on all the hard drives. All I do for my clients (99% of the time) is set them up to save their changed data onto external backup drives; that includes data files from TurboTax and such, as well as all user-made .txt, .rtf ect files. Along with savegame files, you merely install the new HDD, install XP and their apps, then put the data files back into their respective spots. Better than new. For the other 1%, we will use a spare HDD and make a Ghosted copy of the partition. This is where hot-swappability is included. This is not how I prefer to manage servers, where a RAID1 or RAID5 setup is most often used for data durability. But weekly or monthly full backups are done in those cases.
I bought a 120 gig ext HD from Best Buy and there was a class action suit against Western Digital. We won and reparations are now in the works. I HOPE this is a HD thread, if not, sorry.
