Backblaze, a backup company that currently stores more than 1 exabyte of data, and therefore has a lot of experience with hard drives, publishes this from time to time. Drive datawhich are some helpful numbers to consider.
Unfortunately, what jumps out from this data is that longevity varies more by model than by manufacturer. That said, I recommend sticking with known names. Seagate And Western Digital. Still, even brand-name drives fail. I once had a big brand name drive fail on me and it was only four months old. What you get by sticking with brand names is good customer service. In my case, the company replaced the drive without question.
Even within brand names, some external storage drives are better than others. Several of us on the review team have had good luck with Western Digital hard drives. I like the 8-TB model above, but if you want something smaller and more portable, 5-TB My Passport Ultra Has been a reliable drive in my testing as well.
One good thing about buying a drive to back up your data is that you don’t have to worry about the speed of the drive. Even a slow 5,400-rpm drive is fine. These slower drives are cheaper, and since the backup software runs in the background, you probably won’t notice the slowdown. That said, I now keep two external hard drive backups: one on a traditional spinning drive and one on a more expensive SSD flash drive. A traditional spinning drive and an SSD, even if purchased at the same time, are very unlikely to fail simultaneously.
Get the biggest backup drive you can afford. Incremental backups – which is how all good backup software works – save disk space by only backing up files that have changed since the last backup. Even so, you need a large drive to back up whatever is on your computer. A good rule of thumb is to get a backup drive that is two or three times the size of the drive in your computer.
A good backup system runs without you needing to do anything. The backup process doesn’t even have to happen; It should just be automatic. If you have to to make A backup, you probably won’t. That’s when the phrase “data loss” enters your life.
These days, there is software that can automate all of your backup tasks so you only need to do the configuration once, and never worry about it again. As with disk health checks, backup automation tools vary by operating system (and if you’re concerned about mobile data, keep reading, we’ll get to that below).
Mac users should create automatic backups using The Time Machine. It’s a surprisingly simple piece of software and possibly the best reason to buy a Mac. Apple has it. Good instructions How to set up Time Machine to make daily backups to your external hard drive Time Machine is also smart. It will only back up files that have changed, so it won’t eat up all your disk space.