2 ms·

In my experience, Time Machine works great. What doesn't work great are the absolute pieces of crap that Seagate and Western Digital are pawning off on us as vi

by teilo 14y ago

In my experience, Time Machine works great. What doesn't work great are the absolute pieces of crap that Seagate and Western Digital are pawning off on us as viable backup solutions. They are just plain garbage. The controllers are unstable, and the drives are invariably refurbished. (And don't even get me started on the 2.5" drives with embedded USB controllers and no access to SATA ports.) I went through a couple Seagates and a couple WD's, each of which would corrupt the Time Machine volume repeatedly. The last straw came when I had an internal drive failure on my MBP, and my existing Time Machine drive would not even mount, and Disk Warrior, Drive Genius, and TechTool Pro (in that order) were of no help. I switched to using a Thermaltake USB3 dock, with 3.5" WD Enterprise drives. I have not had a single issue since. You get what you pay for in hard drives. If you are relying upon them for backup - don't go cheap. It isn't worth it!

homosaur 14y ago
Everyone should also have a remote backup anyway. Anyone relying on local hard drives to secure their data are completely naive. Not that I DON'T use a local, it's great for quick and easy file backup and transfer, but I sure as hell don't rely on that $100 drive to work correctly and with remote backup, I'm sure not going to spend more than that on a local drive. If your data doesn't exist in three places, one remote, it doesn't exist. Ask Francis Coppola about how well having one local backup worked out. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7019644.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7019644.stm Anyway, you're right about everything you said in your post, but just so people know, you can pay $20K for a backup array and if you don't have a remote, one fire makes that backup meaningless. Crash Plan, Carbonite, Backblaze, etc etc (AWS Glacier anyone?) all these services are so cheap you'd be insane not to just drop the $5 a month if your data is valuable.

by teilo 14y ago

homosaur 14y ago

Everyone should also have a remote backup anyway. Anyone relying on local hard drives to secure their data are completely naive. Not that I DON'T use a local, it's great for quick and easy file backup and transfer, but I sure as hell don't rely on that $100 drive to work correctly and with remote backup, I'm sure not going to spend more than that on a local drive. If your data doesn't exist in three places, one remote, it doesn't exist. Ask Francis Coppola about how well having one local backup worked out. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7019644.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7019644.stm Anyway, you're right about everything you said in your post, but just so people know, you can pay $20K for a backup array and if you don't have a remote, one fire makes that backup meaningless. Crash Plan, Carbonite, Backblaze, etc etc (AWS Glacier anyone?) all these services are so cheap you'd be insane not to just drop the $5 a month if your data is valuable.