Mac Back Ups???

[Wenzel Kotze]

I'm looking to upgrade my external hard drive to a more powerful and user friendly unit. Currently looking at Western Digital (My Book or My Book Live Duo) 2 or 3TB. I also need a unit that can be connected to my home network. Any experience on these or is there anything else out there more suitable. The Apple Time machine is just to expensive.

[Leo Theron]

Wenzel,

Do you have a Back-up plan? Distinctly different from just adding another HDD. At this stage - depending on the life and future replacement of your Mac - your additional disk should have USB 3.0, or maybe Thunderbolt.

Do not forget that you can use an off-the-shelf HDD with a USB interface to be the backup device for Time Machine.

[Creeper]

This is my current setup:

1TB WD hard drive that have a full copy of all my photos (8 years) unedited and also used for time machine. You need a double failure (hard drive and backup drive) to lose all your data. I also backup my documents / personal stuff to Dropbox.

1TB Seagate which is a duplicate of all my photos as well. This is stored off-site most of the time.

500GB portable (USB powered) with all my photos (another duplicate) and documents (FAT32 compatible) for easy transport and usage.

So, I have 3 backups of my photos, 2 backups of my documents and 1 backup of my system. The system I'm not too worried about for I have all the software (yes, I'm a legit user).

[Wenzel Kotze]

What would be the advantage of USB 3 and Thunderbolt?

[Nicholas de Kock]

USB 3 & Thunderbolt is much faster so much so that you can easily edit off an external drive - USB 2 is quite slow. I have two Drobo FS units but they are expensive. Network Attached Storage is usually very expensive so if you find a solution in your budget go for it. One thing to always remember though is that a single hard drive is never a good back-up always have atleast two back-ups.

[Leo Theron]

As Nikolaas said, much faster!

USB 3.0 actual transfer is about three times faster than USB 2.0, with Thunderbolt running at 5 Gigabits/second. A Thunderbolt drive does not only have a fast interface - drives might have two drives in parallel to get the blinding fast transfer speed…

IMPORTANT: You need a USB 3.0 port or a THUNDERBOLT interface on your computer to utilize the speed of similarly equipped drives. At the same time, USB 3.0 drives will work on a USB 2.0 port, albeit at the slower USB 2.0 speed.