Cloud is fine as long as you look at the small print. Especially if it's free you have to remember you can have no expectation of service. If they **** up and dump your data that's tough. A paid for service will likely be more robust. But there is no true security in the public Cloud unless you encrypt before you upload.

The main problem with Cloud in this country it that upload speeds are crap. If you're on ADSL, the 'A' stands for Asynchronous meaning the download speed is higher than the upload speed. So if you've gigs of data to upload it can take weeks or even months and you might never sync properly.

It all depends on how valuable your data is how far you want to go with backups and duplication.

But remember to check your backups. I've seen enterprises that think their backups are fine until they try to use them.

Edited 3 December, 201213 yr by Aspman

Cloud is fine as long as you look at the small print. Especially if it's free you have to remember you can have no expectation of service. If they **** up and dump your data that's tough. A paid for service will likely be more robust. But there is no true security in the public Cloud unless you encrypt before you upload.

The main problem with Cloud in this country it that upload speeds are crap. If you're on ADSL, the 'A' stands for Asynchronous meaning the download speed is higher than the upload speed. So if you've gigs of data to upload it can take weeks or even months and you might never sync properly.

It all depends on how valuable your data is how far you want to go with backups and duplication.

But remember to check your backups. I've seen enterprises that think their backups are fine until they try to use them.

Yep all good advise. We use Symantec formerly Vertias onto digital tape as primary backup solution tapes are stored in a fire proof safe.

Secondary we have Barracuda Backup Box which has its own internal storage and this then replicates to the cloud. Because

its leased it should be more robust as Barracuda then have their own backup and retention policies.

Our upload speed is 10mb+ (download 62mb avg.) so no problems shifting all our data even at off peak times. Although this is a Tad on the extreme side for a home user which is why i suggested free cloud as an 'additional 3rd Backup routine'.

It also helps if your on the go you can pick up important files anywhere in the world as you never know when you will

want to show someone a high res photo of your prised Skoda

Maybe a bit overboard, but I keep three copies of everything. When you have more than 200GB of music, 200GB of photos, videos etc. you soon realise how long it will take you to get this back. Photos are worse as these days digital is the only copy. CD's, DVD's etc. can be re-ripped but would take years, given there are over 1000 involved.

Similar situation here - I have a Western Digital Passport Drive, about 500 GB i think. I regularly backup not only my home laptop but also my works laptop.

Cloud is fine as long as you look at the small print. Especially if it's free you have to remember you can have no expectation of service. If they **** up and dump your data that's tough. A paid for service will likely be more robust. But there is no true security in the public Cloud unless you encrypt before you upload.

The main problem with Cloud in this country it that upload speeds are crap. If you're on ADSL, the 'A' stands for Asynchronous meaning the download speed is higher than the upload speed. So if you've gigs of data to upload it can take weeks or even months and you might never sync properly.

It all depends on how valuable your data is how far you want to go with backups and duplication.

But remember to check your backups. I've seen enterprises that think their backups are fine until they try to use them.

I'm biased as I do work for the company in question, but you can get enterprise archive solutions that keep multiple copies on and offline, don't charge for retrieves and should you wish to leave will give you a copy back on physical media.

I won't post an advert up here, but suffice to say, if you want more info feel free to PM me.

Obviously being a business targeted solution it's aimed at 1TB and up users.

Thanks

Mark

"Data does not exist, unless it is in 3 places" was what we had drummed into us during my BSc Computer Science degree.

I (a professional, self employed photographer) use a LaCie 6tb Thunderbolt drive (split into two, 3tb discs running on a RAID set up) which back's up using time machine to a 3tb Seagate USB drive, My worked images are also on our web server, and on DVD in a fire safe off-site too.

I have an old(er) 640gb passport drive and it's been good - There's a 2tb version now, on ebay for £109+ post. Cheap as chips!

Al.

I heard that Seagate have a reputation for failing early so avoid those. I have a 500G Lacie brushed aluminium thing which has done the job well so far ( touch wood ) and it is a really handy pocket size. Only trouble is the lead is small so only really useful with laptops.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/LaCie-Rikiki-500GB-Hard-Disk/dp/B0031NDVQ8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1354563940&sr=8-1

I heard that Seagate have a reputation for failing early so avoid those. I have a 500G Lacie brushed aluminium thing which has done the job well so far ( touch wood ) and it is a really handy pocket size. Only trouble is the lead is small so only really useful with laptops.

http://www.amazon.co...54563940&sr=8-1

Lacie are just the enclosure and controller manufacturer and don't make drives. It will probably be a Seagate, toshiba or western digital drive inside depending on when the floods hit thailand / philipines / indonesia etc. as demand outstripped supply and the prices went mental.

Seagate premium drives have a very good reputation for speed and reliability but i personally prefer WD and with data safety it pays to be brand loyal if it aint broke dont fix it. Had one failure in 10 years fitting lots of drives.

I will never ever touch a Fujitsu siemens drive ever again after back in late 90's i had a batch of about 20 x 20gb drives go bang consecutively one a day. They are probably great drives now if they still make them but put a nasty taste in my mouth.

Seagate and WD are both tested using the same test equipment.

All hard drives are much the same these days.

IBM had a run of problems, anyone remember the IBM Deathstars (deskstars)?

I also got caught by the Fujitsu problems and spend a summer changing almost every hd in a school.

I've seen Seagates, Samsung and Maxtors go pop too.

Basically get what you want and if you back up it doesn't matter too much if it goes pop. If you use any HD enough it will break. Remember it's an incredibly high tech bit of kit spinning at 7200rpm for weeks on end, working to tolerances at the atomic level. Amazing bits of kit really.

If its just a tens of GB storage requirement, then let someone else take the risk of hardware failure and use the free services provided Amazon Cloud, Dropbox, Google drive and Skydrive. And if you register a hotmail account for both .co.uk and .com you get two lots of Skydrive @7 GB for free - don't know whether it works for multiple same server registrations. 25GB on the Skydrive pay-for service is £6 a year.

As other posters have said its probably worth duplicating or triplicating the storage as well as dispersing it so your're not inconevienced by downtime or ****-ups in the operation of any component.

For short term strorage,, in this size range, USB sticks @ £20 for 64GB are good.

If its films your after storing, then the cherished ones go to DVD/Bluray archive copy with an electronic working copy on HDD/SSD and back-up refresh on the Cloud.

Can't recall having a Maxtor or a Seagate go in Home use.

Nick

Edited 4 December, 201213 yr by Clunkclick

are SSD any better , prices are coming down ?

I'm not a techie expert but would imagine that the speed benefits of SSD's would be lost by having a USB connection.

are SSD any better , prices are coming down ?

Much faster and might be an option if you have an external SATA connector. Mechanically more robust than spinning hard disks but less reliable overall if that makes sense. you also have to have them configured correctly using the TRIM function or they will slow down over time. Win7+ takes care of that automatically I believe. I'm only using an SSD on a Linux laptop and that took a bit of fettling to set up.

I think we will see lots of External SSD's in the future as prices fall , I've got 1 Esata and 4 USB3 , Using Usb3 with WD my passport 2TB, very quick compared to usb2

you got to make sure when you buy these external drives that they are USB3 I think many of the cheaper ones are usb2 only

USB2 480 Mbits/s USB3 5GBits/s esata upto 6 GBits/s

MIKE

Edited 5 December, 201213 yr by g0bgb

Problem is as SSD prices fall, it's because you can get more capacity on a given chip.

The more you get on a chip, the smaller the process and the smaller the process the less stable each bit is.

The less stable the bit it, the more likely you are to get a random flip and the more likely you are to lose data.

You can easily get to a point where a USB pendrive could lose data in months as the sizes shrink.

Problem is as SSD prices fall, it's because you can get more capacity on a given chip.

The more you get on a chip, the smaller the process and the smaller the process the less stable each bit is.

The less stable the bit it, the more likely you are to get a random flip and the more likely you are to lose data.

You can easily get to a point where a USB pendrive could lose data in months as the sizes shrink.

The price is mainly due to Econmy of scale + simple suply and demand. The manufacturing costs are largely the same for a physical disc to solid state and the raw materials arn't an issue. The main consideration is that the main vendors (HP, lenovo & dell) need to be supplying them in their desktops and portables once they drop the physical disc the price will come down on SSD as they will be manufacturing them in higher volumes.

The price is mainly due to Econmy of scale + simple suply and demand. The manufacturing costs are largely the same for a physical disc to solid state and the raw materials arn't an issue. The main consideration is that the main vendors (HP, lenovo & dell) need to be supplying them in their desktops and portables once they drop the physical disc the price will come down on SSD as they will be manufacturing them in higher volumes.

Untrue.

If you can get a 16Gbit chip on the same space of silicon as you previously got 8GBit, then you're cost saving.

That's why process shrink is so nice.

As for economy of scale, NAND and NOR is made in a chip fab before they make their first CPU's as a test process and after it's no good for chips.

The fab isn't used to make a $40 NAND chip, when you can make a $400 CPU instead, until it's no good for that.

Of the few flash dedicated fabs out there, people are not building more, because it takes 5 years for a fab to come on line and people think that there will be an alternative tech available before the fabs come online.

So yes, there is a well known issue with flash process shrink, and there are other solid state technologies with serious money invested in them to look at replacing flash.

At the end of the day, even if everybody decided to move all their data to SSD today, there isn't enough fab capacity to make that amount of storage.

It's always going to be a mix of solid state, hard disk and tape (or similar) because the cost model doesn't work.

I'm not really fussed about that, other than pointing out that you should not trust a flash drive to retain your data for 5 years, because there is a good chance that it won't be there in the same state as when you left it.