HDD or SSD to backup?

[cambsno]

Have spent part of lockdown cleaning up my MacBook and making sense of all the duplicated stuff I have backed up!!

I have a main WD elements 4tb HDD which I backup (when I remember) once a month using Time Machine. The drive is 2 years old IIRC. I also have my older 2TB WD HDD which I do another Time Machine backup when I remember as a stand by (and my photos are backed up to iCloud too). I also have a Sandisk 1TB SSD which i got a few months ago to store my all JPG files and movie clips on, and is my main store for movie clips (library) that I am not working on. The plan is to keep one of the Time Machine HDD at a friends house. Paranoid about losing stuff!!!

I am thinking of getting rid of the 2TB HDD as its around 5 years old and thought that you should replace. The question is what with? I like the speed of SSD but have read they may not be as reliable. Should I get another WD style portable drive or one of the desktop ones instead, is there a difference? Have looked but not many wireless ones out there, which sounds like a better option but the fact its plugged in and updating more regularly would give more wear & tear?

 

[dprees]

In my own setup, I only use SSDs for "live" data -- because they are significantly faster. However, for backup, I excluselively use HDDs. Three reasons:
1) Capacity - I use 8Tb drives (I now have 3)
2) Price - a significant saving for high volumes of data
3) Reliability - though HDDs can and do go wrong, data on them can last for a long time, whereas I'm less confident of the charge state lasting within SSDs for the same duration.

One critical thing I do is to keep more than one copy of my data, which I see you do, too. For most of my data, I keep the online version, plus copies on two separate external HDDs, kept securely away from electricity, water, etc., when not being used for backup. For really important data, I have 6 backup copies (yes, that's excessive, but this is stuff I am not prepared to run the risk of losing. Some of the additional copies are to non-HDD media (USB memory sticks, BD-ROMs, etc).

Your 5 year old HDD does not need replacing, since it is likely to work for many years yet (unless it is clicking, or has ever been dropped). Keep using it, but add another drive as an extra backup. Update files to them alternately, fairly frequently (depinging on how often your data changes).

To speed up the backup process (since i'm running on Win10), I use a free tool called WinMerge -- it can copy only those files which are new, or files which have changed. This saves a great deal of time, and ensures I have not missed anything.

 

[Compuwight]

HHD every time for backups, they tend to fail gradually and give warnings, so that you can take action.
SSD's on the other hand have an alarming habit of simply failing with a catastrophic loss of data.
Data recovery of HDD's can be relatively easy and even when specialists are required they are not cost prohibitive.
Data recovery of SSD's require specialists from the start and are very expensive. I have far to many examples of my customers having to fork out £1000 to recover 250Gb of data.
My vote for backup and archive would always be HDD, preferably in an RAID ( Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) , plus cost wise HDD are a lot cheaper.

 

[troutfisher]

Well if its for a backup drive then speed is not overly significant you are not going to be reading/writing to it very often and the speed is going to be governed by the connection and as Steve says above HDD's are a lot cheaper