External hard drives for backups

Many experienced users on these forums use multiple backup plans on multiple HD's, why because backups can fail too. Especially when you use low grade components like the WD enclosures it is smart to invest in quality components. There is nothing worse than to have a failure and then find out your backup strategy has failed too!

What many experienced users use for EHDs is the OWC (www.macsales.com) Mercury Elite Pro series of EHD, why because they are extremely reliable, easy to upgrade and are reasonably priced. If you are interested look at www.macsales.com and you can easily find them.

For backup strategies, what many of us do is use Time Machine and also create a bootable clone (on a separate EHD) using either SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner. Which cloning app doesn't really matter, they both do the same thing some like SD! and some like CCC.

bandini1987 wrote:

Dear rkaufmann87,

Thanks a lot for your answer. Do you think I could take the EHD that you recommend traveling and use it with my Macbook Pro if I need to ?

You could however if you are doing a lot of travel www.macsales.com may have better solutions available. Look at the dimensions and weight, then you can decide.

Another vote for OWC external hard drives. I've been using their ext HDDs and Mac memory upgrade kits for several years after recommendations from long-time forum members such as rkaufmann87

I ended up with one of their Mercury Elite Pro Dual RAID stations for hosting a 800 CD music library (uncompressed in AIFF) and a regular (single hard drive) Mercury Elite Pro for backing up my primary iMac for several years now. Both are performing flawlessly - not surprising since they're built like tanks which the pro sector demands.

Their before and after customer support staff are top notch also... feel free to call them or email them for assistance in picking the right drive. (For example, I emailed tech support my game plan for a storage/backup/workstation access strategy prior to purchase for my iTunes Home Sharing Music Library server and one of their techs quickly answered every question I had. Their Elite Pro RAID station recommendation was right on target.)

They do offer a portable range of drives which might be more suitable for travel if space and weight are a consideration as well. Check out their Envoy range for portable models.

Hope this helps,

Dave

P.S. I would never keep my "working" data and backups on the same drive. It's asking for heartache in my opinion. Backups should be on drives reserved for only that purpose.

In terms of backups, with the advent of High Sierra and APFS (my

main drive is an SSD), I maintain a clone to an external drive and

periodic "snapshots" on my internal drive. The clone is for a major

system failure and the snapshots are for incremental rollbacks or

file recovery.

My photos, I actually do 3 backups. Two drives, one on a home server

and one on my "work" machine. The third is burning DVDs when

I have enough new photos to fill one. I also follow a similar scheme

with other data as well on separate drives.

For financial data, there is no such thing as too many backups and in

as many different forms as possible so as to be able to recover the info

by as many means as possible.

I only do snapshots and a single clone of the entire system because there

is always the last resort to re-install macOS and apps but data lost is gone

forever so I place more emphasis on that.