Reliable backup drive?

[Gman]

For spinning disks, HGST. Samsung for SSD. - https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html

I would recommend going to the cloud. Or going to a NAS with RAID and replication to the cloud.

[brutal]

I use a 7TB Seagate to do several system full saves, including my work VM, then air gap it.

A smaller drive that stays online for Windows File History.

All important stuff INCLUDING all pics and vids are in a OneDrive folder that is sync'd and versioned in OneDrive cloud.

OneDrive is $99/year for 6 1TB user accounts (can be nested) and comes with all the O365 programs. My wife's laptop OneDrive "documents" folder is nested in my local OneDrive so if I need to scan something, etc. she has it on her computer. No brainer.

All our devices have OneDrive so I don't have to worry any more than occasionally making sure they are syncing on stuff I don't see every day. as much as many hate on MS, I've found OneDrive to be the best and simplest solution.

Work laptop host OS gets backed up occasionally but I really don't care. If the SSD craps out, they'll send me a new one with the corp image and I'll restore my latest VM backup and all my "local" changed project files are versioned to my server in the OneDrive folder and are in the cloud as well.

[Duman]

Dang! Got some hard core ninja computer folks on this site....

[Gman]

Speaking of OneDrive, you get 1 TB per user (up to 6) with a M365 Family subscription for $99/yr; https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/micr...t-365-products

We have a family account and my wife and I both have our own Microsoft logins/OneDrive storage and they're both linked to the licensed family account. We put shared content in the family account and we both have access to it...everywhere.

We also have the latest versions of MS Office installed, everywhere. The cloud-based versions are also available.

[Delfuego]

Seagate drives in a Synology nas. You can then backup to a USB local backup and then too Synology C2 cloud for off-site. Synology nas also comes with a ton of apps included at no cost (photos/drive/backup/o365 backup/plex/surveillance/virtualization/etc).

Don't trust your data to one single drive, vendor or a single location! Same shit we do in businesses...

[Little Dutch]

It really depends on how much you have to save, and what it is.
Unlimited photo storage with Amazon prime is invaluable to us, even knowing they are harvesting data and training their detection AI with them.
One of the cloud based file storage offering for every day stuff is usually the cheapest route. Word docs and such fit on a free OneDrive subscription nicely.
If you want to store all your home theater movies, building or buying a NAS is the way to go. If you build a NAS, seagate ironwolf drives are awesome, definitely want mirrored drives bough.

For anything you don?t want on the network, I?d suggest burned disks for risk free storage without leaks. I don?t trust portable drives much, but I?ve got a few I?ve used extensively for 3 or 4 years now with no issues, so maybe they are better than they used to be.

[Delfuego]

Makes sure your "cloud" is backed up somewhere too. 3-2-1 backup philosophy.

[Circuits]

Only way to ensure longevity is to rotate multiple physical platforms, and cloud services can supplement.

Bare minimum for real security? - two independent physical backup media, not stored in the same location. If you really love your data.

[O2HeN2]

So a sad story from 9/11...

Back in 2001 I was working for Compaq through acquisition of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).

Years before storage had emerged as DEC's strong point* (aside - though management refused to acknowledge it very much). I had worked on their high-end storage products (RAID, remote mirroring, snapshots, etc.) for, at the time, 21 years. DEC/Compaq storage products were a significant part of the high-end storage market.

One post-9/11 story that filtered down to my engineering level was a customer that used my product - their data was so critical that they had enabled its remote mirroring functionality to keep an always-up-to-date copy of all their transactions at their remote site, so if either site was completely lost, they'd have an up-to-the-minute live backup of their data and could continue business.

Remote mirroring required a really fast connection, and back in the early 2000s fast was expensive (as well as not very fast compared to speeds these days). Also the more distance, the more expensive. So there was a tradeoff - how much do you want to pay versus how much distance do you want between your site and its remote mirror?

The company's corporate headquarters was in one of the World Trade Center towers.

Their live off-site mirror of all their data? In the other tower.

O2

*So strong that in the waning days of DEC as Palmer was chopping it up to be sold off bit by bit, a corporate consulting engineer observed:

"Of DEC's 50 million profit last year, storage contributed 100 million to it."

Those weren't the actual numbers, I no longer remember them, but it gets the point across.

[Martinjmpr]

Speaking of OneDrive, you get 1 TB per user (up to 6) with a M365 Family subscription for $99/yr; https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/micr...t-365-products

We have a family account and my wife and I both have our own Microsoft logins/OneDrive storage and they're both linked to the licensed family account. We put shared content in the family account and we both have access to it...everywhere.

We also have the latest versions of MS Office installed, everywhere. The cloud-based versions are also available.

I'm reviewing some backup drives on Amazon and all of them seem to have complaints of lost data, slow operation, poor customer service, etc.

So I'm now thinking maybe going to an off-site backup would be a good idea. So how does One Drive work? I basically get a subscription and then I can set it up as another drive on my computer and just transfer files to and from that drive?

What I'm asking here is whether I have to run some "backup/Restore" software every time I want to upload/download, or whether I can just use it as another drive, meaning that if I can't find one specific file, I can go onto my "cloud drive" and find the backup of that file, is that correct?

In our case, it's likely to be mostly photos. At this point I'm sure we have well over a TB of photos each. Obviously 99% of them are probably worthless but the 1% (growing kids, special moments, etc) are worth spending some money to keep safe.

Besides Microsoft, what other "cloud" backup services are available to a casual (home) user (as opposed to a business?)