General Discussions

[Jlmemt]

I've been having a problem lately, not AMD specific, with storage and would like your opinion. 

For reference, I'm fairly cheap or I would have already bought a NAS. I was trying to get by without that. 

My want is redundant storage so that I can recover from a problem. I thought my mother's hard drive was failing and I got in a hurry and deleted some of my stuff in the process. Then my MIL's hard drive got damaged. So my goal is to be able to not lose data when these things happen. 

I set up a "RAID" array in storage spaces in a desktop that I don't use a ton but is often on anyway, but I'm having problems accessing it from the laptops even though sharing is on. 

Can someone point me to the right way to do this? Or what I'm missing?

[elstaci]

Since you have a laptop I believe it will be easier and better to purchase an External HDD. They are not expensive at all for 1-4 terabytes units.

All you really need is a 1TB external drive. At Amazon you can purchase a 2TB External HDD for less than $60.00.

That way you can backup your entire laptop OS and other data to the external drive.

[Krizonar]

I second the external storage option, I bought a 4TB USB external drive years ago for around $90 on sale. You can probably even just set it up to where your computer backs up to it every so often automatically, so even if you come home one day and your computer's drive is kaput, you have an almost exact copy.

Personally I have mine partitioned and each of my computers does a backup to each of their partitions every so often, so if something bizarre does happen, I can recover from it. That sounds like something you could do since you implied multiple laptops .

[ajlueke]

Depends on how sensitive the data is.  A NAS, or bigger external HDD can work to backup data on a client PC.  But, in that scenario the data has the same physical location as the client and thus the data is still vulnerable to total loss due to things like a flood or house fire etc.

A service like Backblaze can be an option.  Make a cloud backup of the data, and then it can be restored from there.

[rockym20]

I agree with the other commenters, a USB 3.0 external drive is the least expensive and simplest way to go for backups.  I have a NAS as well, but I use it to offload photos, videos, etc. from my computer's HDD rather than as my backup.

[heathnelson25]

I understand that. I had to research though the Microsoft forms and got some of my problems corrected its a problem with different versions of windows. I wound up just using Truenas operating software on my raid computer. 

[Jlmemt]

I forgot to mention, I've had two external hard drives. The first problem is I usually realize I haven't backed up in a while about the time that something goes wrong. The second is that the latest one just died on me. So that was one of the backups I had for the stuff I lost on my laptop, and while I was moving stuff around and fixing it and trying to update backups it died. What I did with that was to put it in a firesafe so hopefully I don't lose everything in case of a fire or theft, but I didn't backup often enough as I said to be very useful for the rest of the losses. So I want something that can be automatic to be current and then have the occasional something that would cover the huge events. 

I hate the idea of a monthly cloud fee. I'm getting more used to the idea of my data being somewhere else, but still don't love that either. 

[elstaci]

The Cloud suggestion is good except if your laptop OS becomes corrupted but the Windows drive is good how are you going to connect to the Cloud if you don't have an internet connection unless you have access to another PC to download the backup and then somehow use that to restore your Windows drive.

Well you can run the Windows Installer file and enter Troubleshooting Menu and click on Command Prompt with Network so you have internet access and then restore your laptop from the Cloud.

Besides paying, as mentioned, a monthly Cloud fee which eventually will cost more than an physical external device in a year time.

I, myself , have a Tower PC with several Internal HDDs which I use to make copies of my Backup. I use 3 different backup programs - Windows own Backup program, Macrium, & Acronis.

On my wife's PC I use a HDD/SDD USB Dock and I use a separate internal HDD which I place inside the Dock and use that to upload a copy of my wife's Windows drive.

But as you mentioned if you purchase a inexpensive External Storage device you run the risk of the Storage device failing screwing you in the process.

[ajlueke]

I currently have a tower PC that contains 1:1 rips of all my DVD/Blu-ray/and 4K films in MKV format.  Currently, 32 TB of HDD space.  Naturally, if a drive fails, I could rip the files again from the relevant discs, but that would take ages.  Instead I use Backblaze.  I can then replace the drive with a identical size and restore the data from the cloud.  

So it really depends on the volume of data you are looking to backup as well, and how easily replaceable it is.  For things like digital photos I would absolutely use a cloud service, unless you keep a backup in a separate physical location.