Get a Mac? I second that suggestion.

"Get a Mac? I second that suggestion."

HFS+ is not a better filesystem than NTFS (both have their weaknesses and neither have integrity checking) and won't save your bacon when the !!!! hits the fan.

Hint: Why do you think Apple sells Time Capsules?

For the truly paranoid Mac user here is one setup - The paranoid person's guide to a complete Mac backup | Macworld

ReFS is just a cheap clone of ZFS, isn't it?

No, but it's still very much in beta. With integrity checking turned on (which is most of the point!) it is horribly slow with high latency - much slower than NTFS or ZFS.

ZFS is not the be-all and end-all of filesystems and it certainly is no substitute for an in-depth backup strategy but it does to a very large extent ensure file integrity. Not much help when your drive goes up in smoke, but at least you know that your backups are almost certainly good (provided they haven't gone up in smoke too...).

Defence in depth is the way to go but you have to be sensible as well - your OS and apps can be restored (you do have all your bought SW keys stored away somewhere where you can find 'em?. Nothing like dead-tree printouts in a variety of places!)

If your backups of irreplaceable family photos are unreadable then you are SOL - the grand-kids will never see 'em.

Mac

HFS,NTFS,ABCDEFG....Z....FS ..... NO FILE SYSTEM WILL SAVE YOUR BACON WHEN THE !!!! HITS THE FAN.... THAT'S WHY WE DO ... BACKUPS !!!!!

There is NO substitute for backups. NONE. NADA. ZIP.

Also, ZFS on a typical single hard drive desktop or laptop machine is quite frankly verging on pointless and not worth worrying about. Many of the benefits of ZFS are derived from being able to work with multiple drives.

For your average punter, with a cheap and nasty 5400rpm drive sitting in their cheap and nasty computer, the difference between ZFS,HFS+,NTFS or whatever is not going to make much of a difference to their life .... a proper backup routine however is another story !

Apple do not sell time machine ! It is included free of charge.

Not only that, it is one of the best backup mechanisms out there for the non-technical user. Easy as pie to set up multi-device backups.

2012 R2 has improved things slightly, to the point where it's now usable, as long as you don't mind a slight performance hit.

Mix, I think Mac meant Time Capsule (right?)

I concur.

Time Capsule is indeed sold, its a combination of Wifi base station and disk inside.

But you don't need one for Time Machine to work, you can use standard external drives (or indeed external RAID arrays).

And if you've already got a network in place (wifi or wired), you can just pay $20/£15 for a copy of OS X Server software that includes the server version of Time Machine so all the macs on your network can backup to a central location.

And just as a quick aside. ZFS works hard to detect file integrity issues ("bit-rot"). In its default configuration, and especially in single disk scenarios, your options to recover from file integrity issues are likely to be precisely zero.

That's why I've said before and will say again ... ZFS sounds all cool. But ZFS is a veritable minefield, and if you don't set it up 100% correctly (with ZFS there are BOTH hardware and software considerations), you might as well just stick with HFS,NTFS,EXT4 or whatever your OS defaults to. Even more so if you're just running a standard computer with a single disk drive inside it.

Focus on getting your backups right first.

After reading through last night, I ordered the lesser version of the Samsung - the 500 Gb. I'd never need 1TB and got this on that basis that sometimes Less is More. i.e. a smaller drive might be more reliable. However, I don't know, but at 35.99 with free post, it can be one of those that lives up the road and has no great demand on its performance.

What I really want is a drive that's a notch or two up in reliability. Two drives in fact - one for the PC and one that has USB portability. However, it seems there's an exponential increase in cost for such items. Any comments?

Recently I needed to backup 42Gb of 9 VMs I created.

1Tb Toshiba backup drive that works on Mac, Linux and Windows using USB3 for $94. 20 minutes later I achieved piece of mind.

And there is room to backup even more, why, I may even use the free rsync tool in a script to be my "enterprise" backup system.

Yes.

What you need to do is differentiate between the infinite number of fancy cases, and the disk drive inside.

If you are buying "drive plus case" for 35.99, then I would be reasonably happy to bet that if you cracked open that case, you would find a cheap and nasty drive sitting inside.

Therefore, what you need to do is :
(a) Find yourself a decent external drive enclosure with the connections you need on it
(b) Source your drive separately and place inside said enclosure
(c) Connect said enclosure to computer and format with built-in operating system tools
(d) Robert is your uncle

In terms of "a drive that's a notch or two up in reliability", what you want to do is:
(a) Go to the website of the major manufacturers (hint: Seagate and Western Digital hold the majority of the market share between them these days, Hitachi also hold reasonable marketshare but they're more high-end drives and will probably be outside your price range).
(b) Go to the "business" section of said website
(c) For backup use, take a look at what they have listed under "Nearline Drives" or "Datacentre Drives" (you could look at "NAS Drives" too, but they tend to be mid-range drives). For day-to-day PC use look at their other drives (although don't go too crazy, no need to look at their mission-critical top-of-the-range 15000rpm models unless you've got the budget !).
(d) Pick one of their high-capacity models that they say is designed for "archiving", "high-end NAS", "content delivery" or such like.
(e) If you feel like it, download the datasheets and compare the specs (especially intended workload limit, MTBF and cache size).
(f) Narrow down your shortlist list by seeing what's in stock on your favourite internet shops....

So basically for backups you'll probably end up with a list that looks something like "Seagate Archive","Seagate Terascale","Western Digital Ae" or "Western Digital Se". All of which will be "a notch or two up in reliability" from the crud normally sold on the high-street to consumers !

Yeeeeees . . . I was sold on that from birth. This adorned my bedroom, I imagine before you were born - though mine was as new. 30/-.

http://www.radiomuseum.org/r/mil_gb_...7_r1132ar.html


Ooops, you've added to your post. Reading in.

The search is on.


NB I had put some - but not all - trust in a Seagate Black Amor. It worked well for a couple of years but then fell over about house sale time. My PC drive carried in bubble wrap in carry on bag - was DOA.

To be fair, my den was dusty due to a tiled ceiling that I'd assumed had another layer on top of the tiles. It wasn't until I started refurbing watches that I became suspicious.

Good luck, let me know if there are any questions, but hopefully you'll see what I mean once you start looking through their websites, they do make the distinction between drives and their intended design purposes reasonably clear.

I suspect it will be largely down to what you can get your hands on from places that sell to private individuals and what they have in stock, although I would hope that hard drives should be fairly universally available as they are a commodity item.

Some of the newest drives only launched in December 2014 might still be a little hard to get hold of, so if you want cutting-edge you might either need to look at sourcing from mainland Europe or just place a backorder and wait a couple of weeks (if there's something in particular you've got your eye on, I might be able to get you an idea of what the wait time is likely to be if your chosen e-commerce site doesn't provide that information already).

Hallo mix - what is your opinion (and the actual stats) on WD Red drives (which I use in my NAS boxen?)

Mac

:suspect:

They're SoHo NAS drives marketed by WD's client storage division (as opposed to their enterprise storage division).

My thinking would be that as long as you adhere to the implied light workload restrictions and are not expecting 800k-1m hours MTBF or market-leading performance, you'll probably be OK. Might also depend on what the vibration is like on your NAS boxes.

Basically if you want the latest cutting-edge drive design, go for one of the current enterprise models. Something sold as a SoHo NAS drive (like the WD Reds) is likely to be based on an older enterprise design.... which might be something that could suit the average home user just fine who doesn't need (or want) industry-leading performance or the latest reliability designs and just wants something more reliable than the nasty stuff on offer at the cheap end of the market.

The Samsung drive is chugging away doing something. I did however partition it first. That way I've got yet another ordinary backup.

I found the menu barmy beyond belief. It's wonderfully presented with nice shots of the control, but Oh, MY, why oh why do they suddenly launch into a lesson about the difference between copy and move. :ugh: Following a first grade subject, they then continue with something beyond my comprehension. Not hard these days.

24 :mad::mad::mad: pages later something meaningful was described. And so it went on. 107 pages and counting.

Who on this Earth has the time these days to read manuals like this for such a simple subject? Not even old retired blokes, I can assure you.

On me bike to the yacht club to calm down.

victor tango. Without reading through again, did you buy that Samsung drive? I got the half-gig and have blazed away on here about the manual. After another bash last night I gave up. After all these years I can not get my head around how these people think. I have no idea if it's backing things up, one can't just poke in and look. It's flickering away merrily, but that might be Windows looking at the 'normal' partition - or even the backup drive, but I'm totally in the dark.

It seems to offer an advanced setting where one can pick the source folder. All very nice, but then NOTHING.

One will press on but just wondered. Mind you, if bright young minds can do it and I can't, I'm not sure I want to know.:uhoh: