External Back up Drive Suggestions Please

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I am looking for an external back-up drive for my MacBook Pro. Choices are numerous. I want quality and as much as possible value. Any suggestions much appreciated.

BTW, At this time I don't use many apps or have much stored. This will likely change soon but not to a huge degree.

Thanks
 

IWT


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Hi and welcome.

The first thing I would say is that no matter how little you have on your Mac, you must really get a backup strategy now. Internal and External HDs will fail sometime. Could be tonight, could be in 5 years. And, as you say, from today on, you will only be adding things.

Time Machine is the easiest to set up and understand. Guidance given if you need it. There are additional options such as cloning software (eg CCC and SuperDuper!).

As regards choice of EHD. Everyone has their favourites and my suggestion might, or might not, be applicable in all countries—I live in the UK. Anyway, for over 6 years, I've used a wide range of External storage devices from LaCie and personally never (yet) had a drive failure. Worth a look at their website perhaps.

By the way, as a general rule, your EHD should be around 1.5 to 2 times the capacity of your Mac's Internal Drive.

Hope this helps as a starter.

Ian
 
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I'll second that notion on the Lacie.
 
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I have been using Toshiba Stor.E external drives with CCC and had no failures or problems booting from them.
 
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MacInWin

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I have LaCie and like it, but also can recommend the WD Mybook series. I have two and both are great.

I have had less success with Seagates. Their drives seem to struggle with OS X, in that they automatically power down if idle, which leads the OS X system to see them as having been unplugged without being unmounted and then it flashes up an error message on that. I've never seen that error except with Seagates.
 
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I am looking for an external back-up drive for my MacBook Pro. Choices are numerous. I want quality and as much as possible value. Any suggestions much appreciated...........

Hello - you might want to take a look @ this recent THREAD - plenty of good discussion, plus I posted a couple of graphs related to external hard drive (EHD) failure rates both related to time and to brand.

Any EHD can fail at any time or last for years - their 'mortality' is about 20% @ 4 years and likely 50% @ 6 years (again see the graphs mentioned above). Seagate drives seem to be more prone to failure vs. Western Digital (WD) - I have 6 EHDs and a LaCie SSD. Many here recommend using WD drives - these are inexpensive even for 1 & 2 TB models.

I would strongly suggest that you do not rely on a single EHD for your backup needs - I have an iMac & MBPro both running Time Machine x2, CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner x2), Carbonite for my wife's personal files (and the LaCie for mine on the laptop) - so a BIG believer in redundancy (kind of like a RAID 1 setup for each backup program on each computer) - and BTW, I've had 3-4 EHDs fail on me in the past and just suddenly w/ some 'clicks & clacks' - Dave :)
 
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Thanks all!!! Your info gives me a good place to start.
 

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