Which is better for backing up about 4.6TB: a 4TB and a 2TB or a 6TB backup HDD?

[Bleedingyamato]

4 minutes ago, SCHISCHKA said:

the software I use AFAIK is only available for linux. its appropriately called 'back in time'. Its pretty smart keeping snapshots every hour and when the drive is full it lets me define what is kept; keep X snapshots per week, per month, per year.

 

I have 2 USB drives for multimedia, I dont keep any media on internal drive because its more useful keeping it portable. Always have at least 2 back up drive because in the past I converted all my CDs to FLAC and then lost all my data by accident along with the CDs.

Ok.  I'm planning to get Acronis.  Pretty sure I heard it's good.

 

Is FLAC good to use for music?    All my music is from the iTunes Store so it's AAC.  

 

Would there be a benefit to converting to a lossless file type from my AAC music?    

 

Though tbh I have no idea what a lossless means for audio files.  ?

 

 

 

3 minutes ago, Qwweb said:

Pretty typical to see if your job is based in computational processes. My dad is a landscape architect and has 3-4 1TB external drives to archive data from his laptop. Personally I have a Thermaltake BlacX duet and a 150GB WD Velociraptor and a 1TB seagate/samsung 2.5" HDD from my old laptop (both as archival storage).

If data redundancy is what you are looking for, I would suggest considering a RAID array (maybe RAID 1 or maybe a RAID 01 hybrid).

 

Personally I have never used more than 150GB on any single drive, I usually get hand-me-downs from my parents or their friends and inherit data from them (I usually reformat the drive unless there is something that I can use on it).

Idk how to set up RAID.  ?

 

I think I'd be ok with just using a backup HDD.  I'd think the chance of both my internal drives and a backup drive both failing at the same time are very slim.   

[SCHISCHKA]

10 minutes ago, Qwweb said:

If data redundancy is what you are looking for, I would suggest considering a RAID array (maybe RAID 1 or maybe a RAID 01 hybrid).

RAID 1 or 6 or 5 or 1+0 or 0+1 or 10 is not the same as having a second back up. it is used mainly in database servers to provide 24/7 uninterrupted uptime. you do not need redundancy for an itunes library

[SCHISCHKA]

3 minutes ago, Bleedingyamato said:

Would there be a benefit to converting to a lossless file type from my AAC music?    

nope. leave it in the format you purchased it in. FLAC is good to convert from CD. lossless means it looses nothing. MP3 trims off some data so it doesnt sound as good, when it first came out it sounded horrible in comparison to CD

[samiscool51]

1 hour ago, Bleedingyamato said:

I think you need a hug..

[Bleedingyamato]

11 hours ago, SCHISCHKA said:

not for backup unless you were using snapshots and want to set a limit that way

I once had an external USB that was a WD green. It had a firmware bug where if you connected it via SATA to a windows computer it would brick itself, hence WD put them in USB drives and sold them cheap.

I use WD red/NAS drives as backup because they have good warranty and are 5400rpm. Blue drives have crap warranty and iv had them fail in the past. watch if people jump on this and try to defend how awesome they think WD blues are. Black have same warranty as red but are 7200 rpm and are very noisy. 5400rpm drives are ok for backup, no real reason to get a super fast drive.

The biggest difference in NAS drives is they are made for use in RAID arrays that provide redundancy. Without getting into detail a non-NAS drive in a RAID 1 array will randomly drop out of the array

Does a warranty really help if a backup drive might fail?

 

 

People use non-NAS drives for RAID though don't they?    

[SCHISCHKA]

4 hours ago, Bleedingyamato said:

Does a warranty really help if a backup drive might fail?

 

Warranty reflect oem confidence. It what they come up with after years of r&ad and sales

[Bleedingyamato]

26 minutes ago, SCHISCHKA said:

Warranty reflect oem confidence. It what they come up with after years of r&ad and sales

I guess I don't entirely not believe that maybe they just rolled some dice and were like "this series of HDDs gets a X year warranty."  ?