I have a networked HD on my system to back up my PCs but I always get a message saying my back up was not successful. I want to back up directly to a dedicated HD. My system runs on an SSD but storage is on a regular 1TB HD which is nowhere near full. I originally thought about using and external HD through SATA or fire wire but my case and motherboard will accommodate at least three more drives. What would be the best option, external or internal backup drive? Thanks.

I use Acronis to backup my PC to one external hard drive and one server every other day and an external offsite drive I bring in once a month or so. None of my data is on my C drive so the backups aren't that big.

If you get another drive and put in your computer, get a HGST Data Center quality drive. The HGST seem to have lower failure rates than the more common drives people buy and the Data Center quality drives are a little more heavy duty.

Keep in mind that writing the data to a drive in the same computer eliminates some of the benefits of a backup. If someone steals the computer, your backup is gone, too. If there is a fire or flood, it's gone. If you take your computer in to have it worked on and the technician accidentally erases the drive, it's gone.

As for external drives, we've had far more failures here with external drives than internal drives in spite of having far more internal drives. For example, the only external drive I've personally used quit after a year or so. Also, one of my oldest brothers had two external drives fail within weeks of each other about two months after he bought them and lost everything on them.

External drives typically have shorter warranty periods for good reason.

It really boils down to how important your data is to you.

The link has one set of hard drive failure rates for different hard drives.


https://www.backblaze.com/blog/2018-hard-drive-failure-rates/

I was thinking about this because about a month ago my wife's PC crashed. It would not boot from the rescue drive so I had to reset the PC. I tried to back up first but it went straight to resetting. This was probably my fault. My wife was not happy that all of her apps and bookmarks were gone but the PC is running again. Also, it was a pain to get her email running again at first and then all of a sudden the automatic set up worked after several tries. Thank for the advice.

I have two NAS's. Both are mirrored Raid 1. One is my main storage and the other I backup to. I also have an external pocket drive hanging off the backup NAS that it backs up to for an extra backup.

I have a home server -- its just an older Dell desktop running (now) FreeBSD that I back up my desktop files to. I have a mac so I could do time machine but I found that a little clunky, so I just copy them over.

I also have cloud backup to iDrive daily. Weekly, I run Carbon Copy Cloner to a bare HDD through a dock. I advise doing this twice with the second drive being kept off site but I haven't got that far myself yet. So I have the original, 2 on site backups, and 1 or 2 off site backups.

I just use google drive linked up to my Aggie network account. All I have really is old pictures and mp3s and it doesn't really change much. Personal documents are mainly created and stored in google drive as well.

We use Veeam Agent Endpoint backup with an external USB HD.