Recommendation on an external HDD for backups
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Seagate's got such a bad reputation is recent years decades I wouldn't take one even if given to me for free. And that's actually happened - I was given a system that had a set of mirrored Seagate drives - one was already dead, and the other failed within the following month. All Seagate drives I've ever purchased are dead. I've retired functional drives from other companies because they just got too small, not because they stopped working. IMO: If you're going to insist on Seagate as a backup drive, then back up in pairs, at least.
I had a very similar experience with 2 Seagate NAS drives. One lasted almost 1 year, the replacement ("free" under warranty) lasted 2 months. Major headache. "A scalded cat is even afraid of cold water" -- I won't be back to SG in a long time.
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Hi all! I own a NAS that has a total capacity of 6TB. More than enough for my business needs. Till today I've been using a 3TB HDD as backup and it worked perfectly... versions... all OK, but of course I'm running out of space. Would you recommend the Seagate STEL6000200 HDD? It's 6TB of capacity and the USB3.0 port seems what I need. Thank you all!
www.robotecnik.com[^] - robots, CNC and PLC programming
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I can only offer my own anecdotes, and I realize other people have had no problem with them. To me, Seagate is like Sony: I won't (directly) tell others not to buy them if that's what they want, but I *will* relate my personal experience, and I don't have any praise with them. I didn't start with such prejudice either; I used to be a fan. I'm always on the lookout for good deals on large hard drives. While I've seen better prices on Seagate drives than some of their competition (especially the cutting edge just-out-this-month models), I always move on as soon as I see the name.
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:~ Synology + WD... And it works perfectly... at least till today I've not seen a failure/problem... I got a couple of the recommended/compatible drives. Now I'm searching for an use external drive to store the backups from what is stored in the NAS...
www.robotecnik.com[^] - robots, CNC and PLC programming
I have the same. Actually love my synology. And I setup (a long time ago) the USB Backup device. Easy to setup, and configure the internal backup software to run on a schedule. I barely think about it.
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I have the same. Actually love my synology. And I setup (a long time ago) the USB Backup device. Easy to setup, and configure the internal backup software to run on a schedule. I barely think about it.
The only thing that scares me is the ransomware... If you get the nas encrypted... then probably the backup disk will suffer the same fate... Then having two of them... and switching from one to the other one each day/week or month... But then it appears the problem with the disk rotation for the backup... it is simply impossible to achieve.
www.robotecnik.com[^] - robots, CNC and PLC programming
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Hi all! I own a NAS that has a total capacity of 6TB. More than enough for my business needs. Till today I've been using a 3TB HDD as backup and it worked perfectly... versions... all OK, but of course I'm running out of space. Would you recommend the Seagate STEL6000200 HDD? It's 6TB of capacity and the USB3.0 port seems what I need. Thank you all!
www.robotecnik.com[^] - robots, CNC and PLC programming
I have noticed that some responders have provided negative views of the Seagate Drives. I have primarily used Maxtor (I believe Maxtor has been absorbed by Seagate.), Seagate, and Western Digital drives with the majority of my machinery. I have never had a problem with any of them. However, to be fair to those who do not like certain drives, one should consider the following... The drive manufacturing industry goes in cycles like any other industry. However, with drive production a certain vendor can produce superior drives for many years and then suddenly put out a "dog" as a result of many factors such as attempts by R&D to create a new technique for data storage, a lowering of demand for a particular drive type, popularity shifts, etc. If any one such vendor were to continuously put out bad drives over the long term, they would have been out of business by now. So my advice, is to select a drive type that fits your requirements and then select one such drive from the major vendors still manufacturing such hardware. If you buy a drive from such outlets as MicroCenter Online, for practically all vendors, it will come with a 30day return guarantee. If you have concerns that may go past the 30days, you can purchase replacement insurance for an affordable fee.
Steve Naidamast Sr. Software Engineer Black Falcon Software, Inc. blackfalconsoftware@outlook.com
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The only thing that scares me is the ransomware... If you get the nas encrypted... then probably the backup disk will suffer the same fate... Then having two of them... and switching from one to the other one each day/week or month... But then it appears the problem with the disk rotation for the backup... it is simply impossible to achieve.
www.robotecnik.com[^] - robots, CNC and PLC programming
Funny you mention this. The first thing I did was mounted the backup USB in a way that ONLY the NAS sees it, and has access to it. So something running on a PC Cannot naturally see the extra drive out there! The next step, and I am just starting this... I attached the second network adapter with a different IP Address... In my hosts file, I have given it a completely unique name. My goal is a startup/shutdown script for my backup software that establishes the connection, then the backup runs, and then I disconnect. In this case, using "More secure" Credentials. This creates a WINDOW in which the files can be accessed by ransom ware. I am also looking at an S3 copy to run after my backups, so it is offsite and it won't overwrite existing files. I have, like many people, heard horror stories...
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A double bay Synology. The backups are being done by they hyperbackup solution to an USB external HDD. They have a versioning system that is great to access different states of the files you are interested in recovering. The biggest problem is that it seems they are not capable to handle multiple drives to make backups. This means you are forced to create n backup tasks (n => one per external disk) and program them to use a specific external disk... this is giving you a failure each day (for the missing disk).
Well sounds like the Synology has a lot more in the way of features than the Buffalo. While Buffalo has a backup mechanism its very limited. Thanks for the info, I will have to look into one of those.
Common sense is admitting there is cause and effect and that you can exert some control over what you understand.
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Hi all! I own a NAS that has a total capacity of 6TB. More than enough for my business needs. Till today I've been using a 3TB HDD as backup and it worked perfectly... versions... all OK, but of course I'm running out of space. Would you recommend the Seagate STEL6000200 HDD? It's 6TB of capacity and the USB3.0 port seems what I need. Thank you all!
www.robotecnik.com[^] - robots, CNC and PLC programming
One thing you could consider is using data compression on the data on your drive to possibly extend it's usefulness a bit further before looking for another drive.
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I can only offer my own anecdotes, and I realize other people have had no problem with them. To me, Seagate is like Sony: I won't (directly) tell others not to buy them if that's what they want, but I *will* relate my personal experience, and I don't have any praise with them. I didn't start with such prejudice either; I used to be a fan. I'm always on the lookout for good deals on large hard drives. While I've seen better prices on Seagate drives than some of their competition (especially the cutting edge just-out-this-month models), I always move on as soon as I see the name.
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The only thing that scares me is the ransomware... If you get the nas encrypted... then probably the backup disk will suffer the same fate... Then having two of them... and switching from one to the other one each day/week or month... But then it appears the problem with the disk rotation for the backup... it is simply impossible to achieve.
www.robotecnik.com[^] - robots, CNC and PLC programming
I also have a Synology 4-bay running WD HDD's with no problems for over a year so far. In addition to backup to local drive, I would really look into also using an offsite cloud backup service for the NAS as well. To be protected from theft/local disasters. I currently use CrashPlan, but with them ditching their personal accounts, I'm moving over to iDrive. What ever your cloud backup provider is, make sure it does file revisions. This will prevent ransomware from knocking out your local drive and your backups. Crashplan supports individual file histories, and so does iDrive, not many other backup services do, so check. But if your drive gets encrypted, and that gets backed up, it's not a problem with these 2 services, as you can just restore from a date prior to the ransomware attack and you have your original data back. Plus these options support real-time backups as well. With Crashplan, file revisions get backed up every 15mins if there are changes (maybe less if I want it to). And any of those versions are recoverable. I don't worry about my data anymore with the redundancy of the Synology NAS, plus off-site backup solution. And it satisfies the best practice of 1-2-3 backup plan (at least 1 local backup / backup to at least 2 different physical locations / at least 3 copies of all data).
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I have noticed that some responders have provided negative views of the Seagate Drives. I have primarily used Maxtor (I believe Maxtor has been absorbed by Seagate.), Seagate, and Western Digital drives with the majority of my machinery. I have never had a problem with any of them. However, to be fair to those who do not like certain drives, one should consider the following... The drive manufacturing industry goes in cycles like any other industry. However, with drive production a certain vendor can produce superior drives for many years and then suddenly put out a "dog" as a result of many factors such as attempts by R&D to create a new technique for data storage, a lowering of demand for a particular drive type, popularity shifts, etc. If any one such vendor were to continuously put out bad drives over the long term, they would have been out of business by now. So my advice, is to select a drive type that fits your requirements and then select one such drive from the major vendors still manufacturing such hardware. If you buy a drive from such outlets as MicroCenter Online, for practically all vendors, it will come with a 30day return guarantee. If you have concerns that may go past the 30days, you can purchase replacement insurance for an affordable fee.
Steve Naidamast Sr. Software Engineer Black Falcon Software, Inc. blackfalconsoftware@outlook.com
I used to love Maxtor drives. Never had a problem with one (we are talking way back in the day). I think toward the end, the reliability might have went down, and I don't personally think their reputation followed them to Seagate when they were absorbed. I don't care for Seagate personally. I normally go with WD drives, but don't have the brand loyalty as I did with back in the 90's with Maxtor.