Data Backups and External Drives

It's been nearly two years since I over-thought how I do backups. Technology changes, prices change, and use cases change: reviews are appropriate.

The cause was finding that one of my external hard drives (EHD) would disconnect and then re-connect from the laptop at random. Diskfix couldn't find any faults on the drive, so I have to blame the USB ports. Everyone thinks that the worst that can happen is dropping an EHD onto a hard surface. Also bad is having the EHD fall while still attached to the computer and so putting stress on the computer's USB port. Those things aren't welded to the card.

The only way to avoid plugging and unplugging an EHD is to use a NAS (either dedicated or a headless Raspberry Pi with EHD's plugged into it), or to use another computer with a more reliable USB port. Either way, we're still using EHDs of some quality or other.

Network-attached storage is the first thing one tends to think about. The original use-case for this was a) it was nerdier than using external drives, b) it was not a lot more expensive per MB than external drives, c) people used to download video files from e.g. iTunes before watching them. The nerds have now migrated to using Raspberry Pi's with EHDs attached, which are computers, not NAS. The cost of EHDs has dropped considerably, while the cost of NAS-related hardware and software has gone up. Finally, what is "downloading movies"? Because streaming.

I don't do daily backups. You should, because you are creating GBs of media every day. Or making irreplaceable music in your DAW, with a bank of plug-ins that cumulates to mucho dinero. If I get to that stage, I too will get a NAS and set up automated differential backup jobs. Because I'd be a pro, and that's what pros do. Most of what I do is writing, and I'm old enough to remember when a writer's nightmare was leaving his work-in-progress on the train. Our idea of backup was carbon paper.

Everything I write is in iCloud, which will do for the short-term, as long as I NEVER delete files. iCloud is really for making a file accessible from a number of devices and keeping them in sync: delete a file by mistake on your laptop, and it will vanish from iCloud.

My ripped music is currently on an external LaCie HDD. I made that decision because I only ever used it as a source to load tracks on my iPhone. Then it was switched off. I do have albums on it that I downloaded from Amazon expressly for train music, and sometimes I want to listen to that. I have the LaCie plugged into a ASUS netbook from 2010 or so. Music does not need high-spec as video does. So I would switch the Asus on, count to twenty and then fire up Music Streamer on my iPad to feed it to my amp through the USB port. Then I would have to remember to switch the Asus off before going to bed. Yes, I know, and I've set the Asus up to hibernate(*) at 22:00 and wake up again at 09:00. Its hard drive spins down even on mains power, but I'm not sure the LaCie does. External drive spin-down seems to be hit-and-miss on Win 7, and there's no provision in the LaCie driver. I looked. So that drive could be on for thirteen hours a day, and I think that disc is spinning all the time. It's warm enough. Not what we want.

So I should use an SSD for the music. No moving parts. No activity, less heat generation. I can buy an internal 1TB SSD drive for about £90 and an enclosure for about £10, which is cheaper than the non-sale price of a 1TB SSD on Amazon. For the added speed, reliability and lifetime, that feels worth it.

(When you get the SSD, you will need to initialise and format it with the Windows disk management facility. Format it as EXFAT as b****y Apple have only just added NTFS-reading with iOS 15. If you don't, you will get strange "access forbidden" errors, which will point you in the direction of permissions, and it has nothing to do with permissions.)

Then I can go back to using cheap HDDs from reputable brands (only because I assume they have better quality control in their Chinese factories than the Chinese brands do), and accept that after 3 - 5 years they will need replacing. A 1TB Seagate HDD is currently £38.

I am going to make sure that each of my laptops can communicate with EHDs connected to any other of my laptops. That way, if a laptop USB port goes squiffy, I can backup over Wi-Fi to another machine.

I adopted Free File Sync - to which I have donated - a while ago, and I'm still liking it.

(*) Hibernate, not shutdown. A computer can't wake from shutdown.