Whenever I find a TH-camr who speaks factually, concisely, and seems to remember there are things such as pace and pauses and periods, then I subscribe. Thank you for a fine video, well produced, and well presented. Why younger TH-camrs rush through a poor script at breakneck speed confounds me.
Everyone that owns a computer should watch this video. A lot of people don't bother with any backup because their data is there most of the time. They only learn when it's too late!
Most home users' computers contain data that isn't worth backing-up, anyway ;-) They don't even know that google, sneakily, scans their phone's file system and copies everything on it without their knowledge. 😛
You really need to make a proper NAS video, explaining what are the options, what RAID is, the difference between using an SBC and a computer as the brain of the operations etc etc. I mean, you're one of the best tech channels out there. You're humble, dedicated to your work, and always do your very best to help humanity as a whole to become more tech savvy - In a world where everything is dumbed down this is more than a welcome addition and to be honest, even when I think that I fully "master" a subject you always find ways to make me learn new things, be it acronyms or simply open source software that I didn't know existed. You have impacted my daily life in so many ways that I cannot even begin to say how exactly. You have the mindset the internet used to have all those years ago, and that the new generation will never have. You do things just to help out others, selflessly. Thank you for making the world a better place :)
I'm glad to see you are proponent of backups and a good backup strategy. I used to do backup software development for windows until 4 years ago and was in that position for 22 years. It is amazing how many people are reluctant to do any backups or consider a single backup good enough. I tend to limit how many copies of large files I keep but all of my critical files I keep multiple backups to the cloud and have saved myself much pain several times recovering files I accidentally deleted.
People have been lulled into a false sense of security because drives are so reliable now. Those of us who have been around in the Early Days know all too well the possibility and consequences of drive failure. You can never predict. Current backups have saved me on multiple occasions when the dreaded click-click started. OTOH, I am still actively using a drive that is probably 20 years old and still shows no sign of distress.
@@KameraShy Coolness, funny I come across this video...and I recently bought 10Gb of WD Black Ed. hard-drive. The reason I went with such a higher end devices was I wanted to bring it as close to the 300mb/sec limit that my ancient I7's bus could handle on the back two sata's. So I got to about 250 or so (they are the fastest available drives commercially). SO now on my front sata's I have two samsung SSDs for 600mb/sec speeds. I also have one military grade portable drive for backups. I keep 2 of all important data (plus the orig. = 3).
yeah, but most "casual users" do not have important data except for maybe a tb of photos/videos from vacations... and take Chris: would he ever need any of backups of 720p videos from 5 yrs ago? this is just toying cause "boys will be boys"; if you do development, on the other hand, you may need hourly incremental backups, but most people just produce dead evidence of what they typed on keyboard during their lifetimes...
Even now, backing up data is expensive. The amount of data besides video on disc that I consider necessary probably doesn't even pass 2GB. CB has all the will and means to back up tons of data, but not everyone does. The number of times I've dealt with HD failure can be counted on one hand. @S C brings up good points about the necessity of data to most people.
I have a 2TB WD portable drive which I have used for several years for my backups. At the time 2TB was the largest available and this drive has served my very well
I use several of these to keep my computers backed up. Seeing a drive with "TB" always fills me with awe, especially considering the price. I still remember back to around 1980 when a new-fangled 5-MB(!) HDD from Seagate would set you back ~$2,500 USD (about $9,000 today). As we were all still using floppies (8" and 5-1/4") on maxed out 64K machines, it was astonishing that anyone would need that much storage on a pc.
People looked at me weird when I bought an "outrageous" 1 TB USB Flash drive in 2006. It's pretty funny considering now you probably can't even buy a 1 GB drive now.
As an older person I always have a sad when any tech goes by the wayside. I do, however, upgrade as needed. That said, I appreciate the time and effort you put into these videos, and I always learn from them, thank you.
As an older person I can remember backing up a one gyg drive that would take 13 reel to reel tapes and take all night and if there was an error you had to start again.
@@herrbonk3635 Find a copy of a 1982 Sears catalog, turn to the electronics section, and then list all the things that can be bought new today, and are still in widespread use.
@@jamesdye4603 No idea what Sears is,but you are confusing products and (chinese) manufacturing prices with technology. The major new electronics inventions since the 1980s are (working) TFT-displays, NAND-flash and using higher frequency radio bands than before. But it's the same basic technology. The same CMOS, only using higher integration. The same type of computer and processor architectures, the same kinds of programming languages, etc.
Something I feel is very important - I strongly (and I mean STRONGLY) recommend adding checksum files to your backup set. That way you can specifically identify any data loss that occurs from media degradation and/or copy problems. In about 2012 I had to convert roughly 1300 DVD-Rs over to HDD storage and they had all been written carefully with checksum files, I was able to automate a process to read, validate and even eject each disk which made it a ping'n'swap arrangement for much of the cycling. The result - sticking to phthalocyanine discs worked VERY well, I was able to affirm that only one azo disc had lost any files at all and even then only a few small ones (the checksum failed for those, I was just using a simple md5 or similar method). Second thing I would also implement *without exception* - a full surface test of any new disk (or disk that has been pressed into new service) with a manufacturer's diagnostic sweep. Yes it takes up to a couple of solid days to run this - the Seagate one can run (Seatools in windows) on multiple drives concurrently and the WD Data Lifeguard tool may be able to but I can't specifically recall at the moment. This test of the disk surface HAS shown up DOA drives about 4 or 5 times in my experience - though some newer SSD failures have been much sneakier and hard to find (Integral P series SATA SSD which finally threw errors when testing with Linux's testdisk utility; prior to that it was failing after being imaged from a working boot drive after about 8-10 hours use). I test all discs that I have with some middling frequency, some say these tests aren't always indicative of failure and while that is true it's far far far better to have run it than not. For this type of configuration preparing a volume for offsite movement - I'm tending towards the use of a Pi with USB3 support that can write these files and perform sha256 recursive calcs at the same time or by script; this method offloads responsibility to the Pi from the main rig and you can simply run a sync program that live-copies changes if you want. I've seen some software solutions for this some of which can even detect large scale abnormal modifications consistent with the presence of malware encrypting a system; once again checksum creation from earlier cycles can really help with this. Indeed - I think this configuration could be quite a useful video especially in a situation where you're sharing a medium with more than one user in a household. You could configure it for swap-out for the offsite copy, each client on the network simply sync'ing the nominated data files over; or if you're more keen having existing shared data folders there already, I've been doing that (USB3 2.5" based data shares off a Pi and before that a Rock64) for about 6 years, it's worked extremely well to be honest even with an eternal (Seagate) 2.5" spinner running 24/7. In that config the controller board of the Seagate 4tb actually died but I re-housed the internal 2.5" SATA drive into a new caddy and it's all ok again.
@@ironfist7789 yes I have been meaning to look more into that - though for archival use I do like a nice flatfile checksum listing which is transportable and easily run on any OS. I have continued to use the method to assure financial bulk funds movement files remain unmolested (fraud prevention), auditors looooved it and started demanding everyone else did that too (other systems managers hated me after that)
Very comprehensive. I commented prior to seeing your comment about scanning new drives prior to first use. I use my drives in my NAS and use BTRFS and run regular scrubs. Had someone drop a new drive at the Post Office, despite being boxed, and that drive had some 200 bad blocks when performing a full bloc scan prior to first use. Really suprised Chris didn't scan his drive first.
Amen. I follow virtually the same routine. I have scripts to verify SHA256 records that I run periodically, even on the NAS with a RAID configuration. Tasking a Pi to verify the offline backup data is exactly the sort of thing they're useful for. Sure, calculating those checksums might take a while with a Pi but who cares? Unfortunately the price of Pi 4s is still ridiculously high so I wound up using a refurbed mini PC in my latest setup.
@Voodoo Yam I don't worry about startup wear. I have a bunch 3.5" internal drives I've collected over the years and never had one completely fail to start. Some of my drives only get fired up on rare occasions for testing however. YMMV. I do believe in redundancy and Dave CC's advice is on point. I keep both files and their related SHA256 checksum records on multiple devices.
I like your approach to backup, however I'd also like to point out - since many people in the comments seem to be unaware of this - that those WD external drives have a huge drawback: they are not standard drives with a SATA connector attached to a USB to SATA bridge board. The latter is now integrated in the drive PCB as a way to save WD a few cents per drive. If anything goes wrong with the flimsy micro USB connector, it will not be possible to extract a drive from its case and connect it directly to a PC to access the data. About the Seagate ST4000LM024 drives, whilst they do still use a standard SATA connector, these are also 15mm thick, so they would not fit in your removable hdd "cartridges".
I have 4 of these drives which have failed and need new electronic boards so they are useless.I also have a wd live and wd .home nas which have all failed.
Picked up a few of these recently for the same drive availability and pricing reasons as you cite here. Good to see someone far smarter than me utilizing the same product with satisfaction!
Data backups are something that everyone learns the hard way eventually, in some way or another. It's highly important to have a good tested backup strategy. Being a person who is is always dealing with TB's and PB's of data, it's always interesting to see what others are doing with their own critical data. Great video, Chris!
Yep leading the hard way is the quickest way to learn 😁 I don't have off-site but I do have sync software, so all the irreplaceable data is synced from my desktop to my laptop and my Nas, some data is also on OneDrive
This is one of mine favourite yt channels, I always learn something. I have two of these, 2tb model. My first was WD My Book 320gb, steel working, steel have the og box. Have a good day everyone.
Always worth promoting the virtues of proper data storage. Also fascinating understanding your approach, I particularly love the pelican cases (have some myself) I have gone down a more automated route with my family’s pc backing up to my prime Synology nas, this then replicates it’s self in real-time to backblaze also backs up a copy of its self to my secondary Synology nas that I keep in another building 10miles down the road.
Automation is the way to go as you'll know your data are always backed up. Also, don't forget to set up notification via e-mail in case of backup issues.
Backup strategy is most important. Multiple backups as mentioned is critical for critical files. Speaking from experirnce, USB external drives should be the "extra" backup for lack of a better term. Always connected USB drives have been the ones to fail first. Using a rotating backup is fine for longer life but USB drives should get the backup and then be ejected and disconnected to get the longest life out of them. This is just my opinion from experience. Nice job as always sir! Stay well and get through the week as best as you can.
I agree with this -- any constantly live drive is a secondary level of backup, as it can (a) mechanically fail due to more constarnt use, (b) be impacted by the same power surges/outages that may know out storage in the PC itself, and (c) can pick up the same ransomware or other malware. "Good" ransomware will encryt files on external drives (or a NAS) first.
@@ExplainingComputers - Yet Microsoft Windows is now using "File History" that can keep your backup drive(s) constantly running instead of just spinning up once late at night to do a backup. And all these "little" File History backup files can impose even more wear on shingled (SMR) drives. It doesn't seem right to me.
I agree with your final take on backup strategy. It is the key! My approach is quite similar (except data size - my archives are much smaller). I classify my data into following categories: "mobile" (copy should be available on all my devices) - around 100MB "laptop" (copy should be available on laptops and desktops) - around 200GB "desktop" (only on desktops) - around 1TB I classify my storage options in a following way: "live" - data that I am currently using "cloud" - Dropbox subscription as a backup and also automatic tool to sync between devices "off-site" - WD Passport device that I use to take manual snapshots once a month and keep in a different place. --- Regarding WD external drives. My first was WD Element 120GB that I bought more than 15 years ago. Never had any problems with it. It was a quite performant and reliable device. Now I use WD Passport 1TB and fully satisfied.
One possible reason for the bare 4 and 5TB 2.5" disks not being sold is a lot of laptops will only accept a drive 12mm or 9.5mm tall - the larger capacity drives are also thicker due to having more platters. Though if I were replacing a disk in a laptop I'd be likely to fit an SSD than another HDD - which ties in with your comment about market demand.
I have a WD Elements 1TB from 2013 and still works like magic at 99% Health and 100% Performance in HD Sentinel. My very first one, a tough drive and a great purchase! Now it's almost full of Movies from you know where, heheh... Nice review sir!
My backup strategy is: Copy what you think is important to a USB thumb-drive whenever you feel the need to do so. this worked perfectly fine until my brain started taking weird decisions without me knowing anything about them 😁😎 Thanks Chris, that was really helpful
I also use a similar case to house my back-up drives. Even did a video on dropping it 15 feet and drives surviving. Not that I recommend dropping them like that regularly, but it is good to know how protected they are.
I have the 2TB drive of the version that you have bought in this video. With my drive at least two things should be noted. When doing a surface scan test, the drive scan speed slows down dramatically towards the end of the test. The second regards the type of drive used in the unit and for those thinking of buying these drives to disassemble, as a cheap way to buy 2.5" drives.. The internal drive is non-standard. The width and length are the same as a standard 2.5" drive, but the thickness is 15mm. Another problem is that there is no SATA or Power connectors as the USB interface has been incorporated onto the controller board.
Strategy is perhaps the most important part! I’ve recently adopted the approach of annually buying a new drive and making a fresh annual backup and storing it offsite. I’ll end up with a pile of drives and hopefully some protection from “bit rot” through time.
Quite interesting, I lost one of my savefiles back on playstation one 25+ years ago because of a mistake, since then I started always having at least twice each savefile. This went further since then. Nowadays I've a professional 32TB Rack NAS from synology, a private windows 10 server NAS PC, more than 100 1 TB hard drives I back up my data once per month (as versions going back for years) and 5 external hard drives like you use. I've some of them storaged in a fireprove save in the home of my parents, the other at my home. Since I've lost my save game in a PS1 game in like 1995 I've never lost any data ever again so it was worth it.
I remember the first laptop I ever got which was a used Zenith Data Systems SuperSport 286e(Still have it in my collection), and it came with a 20MB HDD, and I don't even want to think about how expensive it was when it was new, now back in early 2020 right at the start of scamdemic I bought a Seagate USB 3.0 4TB External HDD for all of $80 USD, I have it formatted for Linux in Ext4, and it's been working wonderfully!! As always Chris thanks for the great video, and for reminding me to do my monthly backups, which consist of the external HDD, some burned DVD/CD kept in a watertight CD case kept on a shelf up high out of sunlight, a few flash keys I keep in my fireproof safe, and some basic Google Cloud storage.
I'm a little surprised you didn't do a full block scan on the new drive prior to initial use. I always spend several hours performing an extended S.M.A.R.T block level scan as NTFS is awful at error detection. I've found that NTFS will happily write data onto bad blocks and you only become aware a file is corrupted when you actually attempt to read it back. I came across this when verifying a backup written using AOMEI Back upper Verification wasn't the default option BTW, which is utter madness in my opinion). Anyway, the backup was done, but I was notified it had failed only because the newly created backup was verified i.e read back to ensure its integrity and it failed due to a spate of bad sectors. There may be those out there running backup software without a verification option set and unaware their data may be compromised. If some of those reading this comment out there are simply doing a COPY using Windows copy and paste, be warned that your data, if written onto areas of an NTFS filesystem formatted drive with bad sectors, will not fail. It's only when you try copying the file back or otherwise reading it that you will find it corrupted and useless.
I recently purchased two "recertified" Elements external drives direct from WD and so far they have been fine. I use one 10TB drive to back up all my VMs and personal data each day using the Linux programme "Back in Time" (maybe such applications may be worth reviewing Chris?). The second drive (4TB) I use to store my games and other stuff when I need more storage; both are connected via USB3 so they are nice and fast. If you look at the drives' SMART data, it's clear that WD have reset some of the parameters but so long as they continue to work, it's all good.
I *always* do something I like to call 2FB (two factor backup) basically it's a physical drive backup stored under physical lock and key - and ALSO backup to the cloud, such as dropbox.
As the backups guy at work, I’m going to be all over this. Ours is a much larger enterprise of 1.2PB disk arrays and 12-13 TB per night, but the principles are unchanged.
Very good video and advice as usual. I use a Raspberry Pi 400 with an external USB 128 GB pen-drive attached for all my day-to-day files and a second 128 GB pen-drive in my drawer (which I back-up to every month or so). For my larger files that includes my Music, my Family Photo's, and my British Radio Comedy Collection (all the Goon Shows, Tony Hancock, Dad's Army, Steptoe and Son, Alan Partridge, etc, etc), I have replaced my two 15 year old 1TB Maxtor USB external HDD's with two 2TB HDD's from WD Elements and Toshiba. I have tried two different types in case one of them lets me down. Neither has as yet but had I viewed your video at Christmas, I think I would have opted for both of them being WD Element (especially as this model seems to be a little more responsive than the Toshiba - however only time will tell).
I like your bkp strategy. And I like the good old DVDs too, for very important data. In order to backup a common PC, I would suggest a small NAS with 2 HDD in raid, + an encrypted cloud (SpiderOak is good for that). And DVDs. DVDs last decades.
I would advise using seagate drives in this case because they still use a standard 2.5 15mm drive inside, WD uses a soldered usb connection so you lose the option to install the drive in a PC directly or swap the case if the usb connection fails.
You made a good decision using WD Drives, I've never had any problems with them, Western Digital makes excellent hard drives (At a very affordable price, and they lasts for years, as long as you are careful with them, I had some drives, well over 10 years, and they still work fine), and so does SanDisk as well, which WD owns. What's so nice about you purchased, is, you don't need a separate power source anymore (Less Is More) to use it, just plug it in, get data and keep it moving. 5 tb on a 2.5 inch drive is awesome, so tiny, yet so powerful. Have a good rest of your weekend Christopher, as I always say keep up the excellent work and As Always, Be Smart and Stay Safe.
Thanks for this Dr. Chris . . . It's always good to think (or re-think) about backing up strategies, although you're obviously much more disciplined than most of us! . . . I was really hoping by now that we'd be using equivalent sized SSDs, but the price is still prohibitive. 🥺
Had my third one of these delivered today which will backup my photo/video rework desktop. I have always backed up my infrequently used 4 towers to 4x WD mains powered external drives and to multiple 3.5 satas but then decided to back up all 4 of them to 2x WD Elements 5tb. So now have 3 copies of historic data and with this new third drive I will be backing up the machine I use daily to 2 of these elements drives. So funny that my first backup was also a WD 320 external. I also (with trepidation) remove any supplier software and avoid large externals with encrytion. My biggest takeaway from your video is that I really must take one copy off site and that I can and should use my encryted thumb drives for my financial data. I agree that these 5tb drives are excellent value and perform well and I even store and operate them within their original plastic enclosure and boxes making a small hole for the usb lead. N.B.obviously not for longer than minor incremental backup as they could overheat.
Please mind the USB port is often integrated with the mainboard of the drive. If it is broken you can't disassembly the case and plug broken drive to PC to recover data. WD likes very much this solution. I also recommend to avoid SRM drives.
Yes, care does need to be taken with the USB ports on these drives. But if you run a system where no single drive failure can ever result in data loss, it is not a massive issue.
I've always been wary of using USB drives for backups, especially WD ones, because they are hard to recover data from due to USB controller being integrated into the drive and more prone to failure than the drive itself.
Yep. The only form of USB drive I use is an external enclosure with an internal drive installed in it. Should the bridge chip get fried or die, I am still likely to get to the data on the drive using another enclosure, or connecting it to a SATA port.
I had no idea about the differences, but glad to be informed. I use seagate BUP 5TB externals, because I can get them for $100 USD at my local Costco warehouse.
Also, never assume your backups are complete. You should restore completely to a second system from your back ups occasionally to test them. I worked for a company that went bankrupt because a program was keeping a maintenance file open and it was not getting backed up. Test test test!
With the acquisition of a 'dead' PC, I'm up to about 4-1/2 TB local storage, having recovered a 1TB Toshiba (DANGER WILL ROBINSON) from it. Quite the change when in '99 I had an amazing 12GB storage over several machines. Of course, these days 128GB TF memories are at 18 bucks Canajian. Compare to the 64K memory chips I bought in '92 for a hundred bucks! SBCs aside, this is my favourite topic as well.
I just purchased this drives 4 tb brother yesterday to back up my data too! Perfect timing for your video. I too will delete the software that came on the drive. I noticed that there are really no drives bigger that 5 tb for sale at best buy.
Hard drives and storage have definitely gotten cheaper over time. I remember when for that $100, you could only buy a 500GB External Hard Drive, and a 1GB USB costs over $20.
My friend's first HD was a whole 3 MB it was designed for a Pet computer and he used it for his Commodore 64, I remember it cost quite a bit of money even though it had light usage already,
I have similar drives, but mine are segate 5T usb. I have two of them and run a simple rsync command as a cron job late every night to copy the data. No offsite storage, but my data is not that critical. In the 90's I used tape drives. I alternated between 3 different tapes. The tape backup did save me one time when my computer was stolen. I was able to get a new computer with the same tape drive, and I restored everything using one of the backup tapes. That was a really good system as the tapes were relatively cheap and easy to deal with.
Speaking of drives internal or external... A video on the pros/cons of CMR/SMR drives would be interesting. Eg. How to find what type of drive you have? Speed/Nas or OS issues.
One thing to improve upon, and something that pretty much everyone who talks about backup tends to miss/skip - is testing that the backup does indeed work. Running a program that tests the files in location A vs location B, bit by bit would be a good way to do it.
Good strong backup strategy. One thing to think about is to also have a tested restore strategy. I used to audit management systems in the good old days before retirement, and I did come across a client that had to restore some data after a failure but it didn't work so it cost them a lot of money to get in specialist to unravel the problems, 3 days of down time. After that they devised and tested a restore strategy and it could be done in a few hours , not days.
I don't trust mechanical hard drives, so I did the same as you have done, but with ADATA HD710 Pro 2TB, which are $69.95 at Amazon. It is true, that I don't have the requirement for 5TB backup drives, but the drives I use are far more rugged than a spinning drive. It just makes me feel better.
The problem with those drives and others, is that the USB connector is part of the disk. If the connector breaks, or the USB circuit stops working, then the disk inside is unrecoverable. There was a time when the internal disk could be taken out and used from its own internal SATA connector.
I remember spending a lot of time planning a backup strategy, even going down the rabbit hole of trying to learn about other file systems (ZFS always seemed like an interesting option). I ended up using restic with the 3-2-1 rule. There's no need to make things complex...
My backup strategy is a bit insane. ☺ My main workstation is a Linux box, and I use RAID-1 everywhere. That's not a backup strategy, but it does help guard against drive failures. In fact, all my machines have software RAID-1 (except for laptops). Disks are so cheap there's no reason not to do that. I have two USB drives in RAID-1 attached to my workstation; everything gets backed up to those daily. I have a Raspberry Pi 4 with two RAID-1 USB drives; everything gets backed up there daily as well. And finally, the RPi 4 backs itself up every night to a similarly-configured RPi4 with two RAID-1 USB drives at my sister's place; that's my offsite backup. I also have a PC in my living room with RAID-1 SATA drives and my workstation backs itself up to there nightly as well. For the Pi backups, I keep versioned backups by date. Because rsync doesn't touch unmodified files, I first hard-link all of yesterday's backup to today's and then rsync over it. This lets me keep many day's worth of backups while only using disk space for one full backup plus the daily increments. I prune the backups so I keep one backup for the end of each month going back to November 2021 as well as the most recent 7 daily backups.
Great video Chris, loved it!! I had to remind myself about your previous video "Cyber Security: Backups & Encryption" and I am glad I did. My WD HDD failed recently and I use the 3-2-1 backup solution. I quickly purchased a new HDD backup drive, as I have a lot of pictures and MP3 tracks for my DJ software. Looking forward to future videos, keep safe!
I have TB of archived data, each kept on mirrored pairs of USB disks. In one sense there are only 2 types of disks; a broken disk and a disk that will break sometime in the future. By keeping dual archives I reduce the risk of loss from 100% to < 0.1% (both disks failing before I can copy the data).
I just had a WD Elements 5TB drive fail two months before the 2-year warranty expired. It still worked, but was louder than my laptop fan. I received a refurbished replacement from WD in about two weeks. That was much better then two Seagate USB drives that failed several months after the 2-year warranty expired. Since I have had three USB drive failures in the third year of operation, I am going to switch from the Elements drives with the 2 year warranty to the WD My Passport for the 3-year warranty.
YAY, STANLEY!!! Hooray for Stanley the Knife! What a good, reliable knife. ♥️ Anyway, it's kind of wild how hard drives, including those with terabytes of storage, have gotten cheaper in recent years. I checked out the link for the MyPassport portable drive and HOLY CRAP, almost $55 for 1TB?! That's cheap all things considered. As for how I back my data up, well, I'm gonna get my ass kicked for this but I've been using cloud-based services to back up my stuff ever since I was still a chronically broke teenager. Art, pictures, game data... The works. I still regret not backing up certain stuff from my old Acer laptop to the cloud before it went to silicone heaven. 😭 So yeah, I should really consider investing in some portable hard drives for my data back-up shenanigans. I know they also make ones especially for gaming stuff which I need to consider investing in as well. Excellent video as always!
Wonderful video! Your passion for storage is infectious! Video suggestion if I may - I visited the Derby Computer Museum yesterday and it was fantastic (lots of computers from the 70s, 80s and 90s). Perhaps a visit could be the subject of one of your videos?
I'd be really careful what kind of data you copy to this WD drive. The flimsy USB Micro B plug/socket is very sensitive to mechanical stress when handling the cable. I had a broken WD Elements just after warranty expired and also used to work in a company where we had several broken WD Elements drives. The drive uses a special (very thin) PCB which is made out of plastic and therefore can not even be re-soldered when the USB socket comes partially off (and it will if you unplug/replug often). The drive is a special version which has the USB connector on board and no SATA connector, so you will not even be able to remove the drive from the case and read its data via a SATA connection. Really good explanation of backup strategies, I do like your scripts and your British English... 😊
This is good advice to all. But pain is also avoided by applying a VERSION backup process. I use sync software that permits versioning, and so inadvertent or undetected corruption or errors in a file can be rolled back. A pure backup might save the corrupted file... Which would be pointless. Also the schedule of backups across the different devices is important to ensure a full backup is on each device. Heavy data use at work demands a risk based pyramid schedule, so daily backups can be incremental, maybe weekly too. But full backups are done monthly. And in each case the number of versions to keep is adjusted to nest the frequencies. E.g. dailies can be kept for 14days, weeklies for 6 months, so on. With camera resolution generating gb sized videos, after a few years the dependence on devices to keep your media safe is scary, especially with the time overhead to start new ones ... You could also use the cloud. With many people just using phones to create media this might be their only backup. That would scare me. The old mantra of different TYPES of device is maybe important too e.g. ssd or optical... and others have noted their resilience and longevity means they should be replaced frequently even if they are just sitting there. But you should always test the RECOVERY of files frequently, especially using backup software, as corruption of that is also possible. The best policy is kiss, don't rely on software that creates its own proprietary volume whether encrypted or not. I admit with Vera that is not possible. The 123 mantra started in the era of floppy disks when the drive itself could murder a disk and when the floppy was also used for original material. Hence putting disk 2 in to fix the problem might just murder that disk, leaving you with the 3rd disk intact (assuming you realise in time!) Nowadays the mantra remains valid to optimise the probability of recovery versus the cost or value of the material you are saving. So maybe the first advice would be, don't save useless crap! And so regularly purge your files for duplication and stuff you no longer need. Well that escalated quickly...
Great video again Chris! Just a note to everyone to be wary of WD's WD5000LPSX 500GB Mobile Black drive. I was unlucky enough to purchase one direct from WD after I saw it was listed as a performance drive...sadly, nothing could be further from the case as unlike their earlier Black 500GB drive in this form factor, the new drive uses SMR technology. Performance is dreadful and quite unlike any other WD Black drive I have purchased.
I think all 5TB 2.5in external HDDs will be SMR now. Not necessarily a problem if you intend to back up be incrementally adding more files over time. Very possibly a problem if you expect to modify significant amounts of existing data on the drive.
@@jamietaylor5570 Nowadays probably all drives bigger than 500MB are SMR. I have one quite new singleplate WD 1TB. I wondered why it is so slow. My old 250MB and 500MB drives are faster. I finally found out it is SMR
@@olaf3174 There plenty of high-cap 3.5in non-SMR drives around but you have to be careful what you buy and with external drives there is generally no guarantee as to what's inside.
There's nothing wrong with SMR drives as long as you use them as originally intended. Seagate named their original 8 TB SMR drives "Archive" for a reason. Just write to them sequentially and they are no trouble at all. SMR as a technology got its undeserved bad reputation thanks to Western Digital who started branding them for applications for which they were not suitable, namely "the Red debacle", which they tried to hide, then lied about and eventually were forced to admit to. I like to use Toshiba hard drives when I can get them.
Those StarTech caddies are great. At the time I bought them Amazon was selling them with the dock for less than just the drive caddies alone so I have loads of these things. StarTech did bring out a USB 3 version, but I recall them being in the £40-50 region which I think was too expensive. A shame they made they so expensive. I liked that they used the SATA connector when docked but you could still use standard USB to just plug it in anywhere if you didn't have a system with the dock to hand, someone put some thought into designing them.
After failing to properly back up a database in the 1980s on floppy disks and had to re-type a lot of data, I've religiously taken backups. I now use mirroered NAS (different vendor and hard disk) and until recently still used an LTO tape robot. I also use cloud storage providers, in particular Amazon, that offer 11 nines of durability (redundancy) for some critical data. I couldn't accept the risk of using a single vendor and a collection of drives as my backup strategy.
Could you introduce us to Ms Emery Board in a future video? She does a nice job of keeping your nails tidy and deserves a place in the spotlight with Stanley and Mr Scissors.
I've largely abandoned 3.5" disks altogether, because I don't see them scaling well with the physical size of today's computer machines. I have three of those ST5000 Seagate disks; I use one with my 4k camcorder (using 1MB sectors) and the other two in my main rack-mount 1U NAS in RAID1. If you ask me, 2.5" disks are far more practical than 3.5"; but the achilles heel is when you hit drive thickness issues, especially in multi-disk caddy/tray setups. The ST5000 is 15mm thick, which is its limiting factor.
Good morning, gentlemen. Am I the only one who still uses DVD-RAM for my backups (along with external HDs)? 😂😂 I have 3 external Western Digital HDs and they are pretty reliable all these years.
🤗😺😎i have too, not mentionned, that's just because I have those 8Gb dvd for long all new, but not having the use for them, external hard drives came, and time had let them in my library. They are All lightscribe. Times are changing, So....
I bought a 5TB Seagate USB drive a few years ago, tore it apart, exposed the SATA connector and put it in my laptop. It took some creative work to get it to fit physically because it was a non-standard height, but it's still nice to have a 5TB spinning drive for stuff that can be slow as well as a 1-2TB SSD.
Thanks for another interesting video! When you said you are going to open the drive I really hoped you would open the case, not just the package. :) I don''t like these kinds of external drives very much as the USB controller and socket seem to be directly on the drive's PCB. This means that if the socket ever gets damaged (e.g., when you handle the drive roughly while plugged in) you will probably have a hard time getting your data back. I'm still using a regular 2.5" drive in an external case for this reason. Looks like I will have to look for an alternative when buying the next drive, though.
Thanks for this -- and I agree that regular drives in caddies are a better solution, if possible. However, no failure of a single drive can ever result in data loss if you run an effective backup strategy. So if a connector fails, I will always be able to access my data -- on the three or more other drives on which it resides. :)
I have 4 WD HDDs and I backup my home directory in all of them every time with Deja Dup and encryption on. I keep everything simple and a program that is designed for home backup and easy to use.
To use an old joke: How do I spell relief? B-A-C-K-U-P. I've been there where a critical file became inaccessible when the laptop I was using crashed and I didn't make a back up. Fortunately, we were able to recover the file and even though it was corrupted, at least I had something to work with while I was rebuilding the file. This was a manual intended for training purposes in the department I was working in at the time. It's great that you're doing these videos where you're reviewing the latest product. I appreciate the unbiased approach you take and that you're keeping it nice and simple for easier understanding.
I wonder what strategy you are using for the actual backups. Maybe you can make another video about that. Making backups (except maybe in the case of making backups of video projects) is not simply a matter of copying your data directory to an external drive. You want to keep versions, so you can go back to last month's version when you notice today that 3 weeks ago you damaged a file, but you already made 3 backups after that. Also, you want to have some lifetime on those backups so that data is not needlessly kept for a very long time. It may also depend on the actual data whether you want that or not. (you want to keep your old documents "forever" but not your operating system software) It would be interesting to know what kind of software you use for it, for Windows and Linux, and how you configure its settings.
![Which is the Best External HDD? WD My Passport vs Seagate One touch detailed comparison [Eng]](/img/n.gif)
Whenever I find a TH-camr who speaks factually, concisely, and seems to remember there are things such as pace and pauses and periods, then I subscribe. Thank you for a fine video, well produced, and well presented. Why younger TH-camrs rush through a poor script at breakneck speed confounds me.
Thanks for this, appreciated. :)
I agree with you, Edward and I'm a much older user who finds I read and answer on the go (as I am now).
Nerves, high energy, changing preferences, many reasons :)
All those energy drinks they consume.
And low IQ
Everyone that owns a computer should watch this video. A lot of people don't bother with any backup because their data is there most of the time. They only learn when it's too late!
Most home users' computers contain data that isn't worth backing-up, anyway ;-)
They don't even know that google, sneakily, scans their phone's file system and copies everything on it without their knowledge. 😛
You really need to make a proper NAS video, explaining what are the options, what RAID is, the difference between using an SBC and a computer as the brain of the operations etc etc. I mean, you're one of the best tech channels out there. You're humble, dedicated to your work, and always do your very best to help humanity as a whole to become more tech savvy - In a world where everything is dumbed down this is more than a welcome addition and to be honest, even when I think that I fully "master" a subject you always find ways to make me learn new things, be it acronyms or simply open source software that I didn't know existed.
You have impacted my daily life in so many ways that I cannot even begin to say how exactly. You have the mindset the internet used to have all those years ago, and that the new generation will never have. You do things just to help out others, selflessly.
Thank you for making the world a better place :)
Thanks for this, and a good video idea. Noted. :)
Yes, a good NAS video, please. I just posted a typical bush scenario a few minutes ago, then saw this later.
I'm glad to see you are proponent of backups and a good backup strategy. I used to do backup software development for windows until 4 years ago and was in that position for 22 years. It is amazing how many people are reluctant to do any backups or consider a single backup good enough. I tend to limit how many copies of large files I keep but all of my critical files I keep multiple backups to the cloud and have saved myself much pain several times recovering files I accidentally deleted.
People have been lulled into a false sense of security because drives are so reliable now. Those of us who have been around in the Early Days know all too well the possibility and consequences of drive failure. You can never predict. Current backups have saved me on multiple occasions when the dreaded click-click started. OTOH, I am still actively using a drive that is probably 20 years old and still shows no sign of distress.
@@KameraShy Coolness, funny I come across this video...and I recently bought 10Gb of WD Black Ed. hard-drive. The reason I went with such a higher end devices was I wanted to bring it as close to the 300mb/sec limit that my ancient I7's bus could handle on the back two sata's. So I got to about 250 or so (they are the fastest available drives commercially). SO now on my front sata's I have two samsung SSDs for 600mb/sec speeds. I also have one military grade portable drive for backups. I keep 2 of all important data (plus the orig. = 3).
yeah, but most "casual users" do not have important data except for maybe a tb of photos/videos from vacations... and take Chris: would he ever need any of backups of 720p videos from 5 yrs ago? this is just toying cause "boys will be boys"; if you do development, on the other hand, you may need hourly incremental backups, but most people just produce dead evidence of what they typed on keyboard during their lifetimes...
@@KameraShy And accidental deletion or malware. I think losing all of your photos even if you are talking
Even now, backing up data is expensive. The amount of data besides video on disc that I consider necessary probably doesn't even pass 2GB. CB has all the will and means to back up tons of data, but not everyone does. The number of times I've dealt with HD failure can be counted on one hand. @S C brings up good points about the necessity of data to most people.
I've been using this HDD for the past 5 years. Still works perfectly.
I have a 2TB WD portable drive which I have used for several years for my backups. At the time 2TB was the largest available and this drive has served my very well
i remember my first WD Elements 2.5" external HDD was only 500GB back in 2012 and it still works. these drives are very handy.
I use several of these to keep my computers backed up. Seeing a drive with "TB" always fills me with awe, especially considering the price. I still remember back to around 1980 when a new-fangled 5-MB(!) HDD from Seagate would set you back ~$2,500 USD (about $9,000 today). As we were all still using floppies (8" and 5-1/4") on maxed out 64K machines, it was astonishing that anyone would need that much storage on a pc.
People looked at me weird when I bought an "outrageous" 1 TB USB Flash drive in 2006. It's pretty funny considering now you probably can't even buy a 1 GB drive now.
As an older person I always have a sad when any tech goes by the wayside. I do, however, upgrade as needed. That said, I appreciate the time and effort you put into these videos, and I always learn from them, thank you.
As an older person I can remember backing up a one gyg drive that would take 13 reel to reel tapes and take all night and if there was an error you had to start again.
did you say you're SAD or misspelt SSD ?
What "tech" has gone by the wayside? We use mostly the same technology today as we used in the 1990s and 80s.
@@herrbonk3635 Find a copy of a 1982 Sears catalog, turn to the electronics section, and then list all the things that can be bought new today, and are still in widespread use.
@@jamesdye4603 No idea what Sears is,but you are confusing products and (chinese) manufacturing prices with technology. The major new electronics inventions since the 1980s are (working) TFT-displays, NAND-flash and using higher frequency radio bands than before. But it's the same basic technology. The same CMOS, only using higher integration. The same type of computer and processor architectures, the same kinds of programming languages, etc.
Something I feel is very important - I strongly (and I mean STRONGLY) recommend adding checksum files to your backup set. That way you can specifically identify any data loss that occurs from media degradation and/or copy problems. In about 2012 I had to convert roughly 1300 DVD-Rs over to HDD storage and they had all been written carefully with checksum files, I was able to automate a process to read, validate and even eject each disk which made it a ping'n'swap arrangement for much of the cycling. The result - sticking to phthalocyanine discs worked VERY well, I was able to affirm that only one azo disc had lost any files at all and even then only a few small ones (the checksum failed for those, I was just using a simple md5 or similar method).
Second thing I would also implement *without exception* - a full surface test of any new disk (or disk that has been pressed into new service) with a manufacturer's diagnostic sweep. Yes it takes up to a couple of solid days to run this - the Seagate one can run (Seatools in windows) on multiple drives concurrently and the WD Data Lifeguard tool may be able to but I can't specifically recall at the moment. This test of the disk surface HAS shown up DOA drives about 4 or 5 times in my experience - though some newer SSD failures have been much sneakier and hard to find (Integral P series SATA SSD which finally threw errors when testing with Linux's testdisk utility; prior to that it was failing after being imaged from a working boot drive after about 8-10 hours use).
I test all discs that I have with some middling frequency, some say these tests aren't always indicative of failure and while that is true it's far far far better to have run it than not.
For this type of configuration preparing a volume for offsite movement - I'm tending towards the use of a Pi with USB3 support that can write these files and perform sha256 recursive calcs at the same time or by script; this method offloads responsibility to the Pi from the main rig and you can simply run a sync program that live-copies changes if you want. I've seen some software solutions for this some of which can even detect large scale abnormal modifications consistent with the presence of malware encrypting a system; once again checksum creation from earlier cycles can really help with this.
Indeed - I think this configuration could be quite a useful video especially in a situation where you're sharing a medium with more than one user in a household. You could configure it for swap-out for the offsite copy, each client on the network simply sync'ing the nominated data files over; or if you're more keen having existing shared data folders there already, I've been doing that (USB3 2.5" based data shares off a Pi and before that a Rock64) for about 6 years, it's worked extremely well to be honest even with an eternal (Seagate) 2.5" spinner running 24/7. In that config the controller board of the Seagate 4tb actually died but I re-housed the internal 2.5" SATA drive into a new caddy and it's all ok again.
That is one thing nice about ZFS is the data integrity check (for the data that is still on a running NAS array).
@@ironfist7789 yes I have been meaning to look more into that - though for archival use I do like a nice flatfile checksum listing which is transportable and easily run on any OS. I have continued to use the method to assure financial bulk funds movement files remain unmolested (fraud prevention), auditors looooved it and started demanding everyone else did that too (other systems managers hated me after that)
Very comprehensive. I commented prior to seeing your comment about scanning new drives prior to first use. I use my drives in my NAS and use BTRFS and run regular scrubs. Had someone drop a new drive at the Post Office, despite being boxed, and that drive had some 200 bad blocks when performing a full bloc scan prior to first use. Really suprised Chris didn't scan his drive first.
Amen. I follow virtually the same routine. I have scripts to verify SHA256 records that I run periodically, even on the NAS with a RAID configuration. Tasking a Pi to verify the offline backup data is exactly the sort of thing they're useful for. Sure, calculating those checksums might take a while with a Pi but who cares? Unfortunately the price of Pi 4s is still ridiculously high so I wound up using a refurbed mini PC in my latest setup.
@Voodoo Yam I don't worry about startup wear. I have a bunch 3.5" internal drives I've collected over the years and never had one completely fail to start. Some of my drives only get fired up on rare occasions for testing however. YMMV.
I do believe in redundancy and Dave CC's advice is on point. I keep both files and their related SHA256 checksum records on multiple devices.
Backing up and redundancy are very important to me! I have a few thousand computer customers and i constantly push BACK UPS! Great video Sir!
The 3-2-1 Backup Strategy is the Best
I like your approach to backup, however I'd also like to point out - since many people in the comments seem to be unaware of this - that those WD external drives have a huge drawback: they are not standard drives with a SATA connector attached to a USB to SATA bridge board. The latter is now integrated in the drive PCB as a way to save WD a few cents per drive.
If anything goes wrong with the flimsy micro USB connector, it will not be possible to extract a drive from its case and connect it directly to a PC to access the data.
About the Seagate ST4000LM024 drives, whilst they do still use a standard SATA connector, these are also 15mm thick, so they would not fit in your removable hdd "cartridges".
But you could still replace the microUSB port or controller, right?
@@zurgmuckerberg yes, but you will need to find a shop capable of doing it. If a component on the PCB fails, the problem would be worse.
I have 4 of these drives which have failed and need new electronic boards so they are useless.I also have a wd live and wd .home nas which have all failed.
Picked up a few of these recently for the same drive availability and pricing reasons as you cite here. Good to see someone far smarter than me utilizing the same product with satisfaction!
Data backups are something that everyone learns the hard way eventually, in some way or another. It's highly important to have a good tested backup strategy.
Being a person who is is always dealing with TB's and PB's of data, it's always interesting to see what others are doing with their own critical data.
Great video, Chris!
Yep leading the hard way is the quickest way to learn 😁
I don't have off-site but I do have sync software, so all the irreplaceable data is synced from my desktop to my laptop and my Nas, some data is also on OneDrive
I just recently lost a very important document of mine. That's when I learned and now I backup everything important extensively.
I hope it's not PB of personal data. That's quite a lot, even in 2023.
This is one of mine favourite yt channels, I always learn something. I have two of these, 2tb model. My first was WD My Book 320gb, steel working, steel have the og box. Have a good day everyone.
Always worth promoting the virtues of proper data storage. Also fascinating understanding your approach, I particularly love the pelican cases (have some myself)
I have gone down a more automated route with my family’s pc backing up to my prime Synology nas, this then replicates it’s self in real-time to backblaze also backs up a copy of its self to my secondary Synology nas that I keep in another building 10miles down the road.
Automation is the way to go as you'll know your data are always backed up. Also, don't forget to set up notification via e-mail in case of backup issues.
My QNAP gone and I have to find my data. I prefer more standard solution.
It's always great reminder to make backups with every video discussing this topic.
Backup strategy is most important. Multiple backups as mentioned is critical for critical files. Speaking from experirnce, USB external drives should be the "extra" backup for lack of a better term. Always connected USB drives have been the ones to fail first. Using a rotating backup is fine for longer life but USB drives should get the backup and then be ejected and disconnected to get the longest life out of them. This is just my opinion from experience.
Nice job as always sir! Stay well and get through the week as best as you can.
I agree with this -- any constantly live drive is a secondary level of backup, as it can (a) mechanically fail due to more constarnt use, (b) be impacted by the same power surges/outages that may know out storage in the PC itself, and (c) can pick up the same ransomware or other malware. "Good" ransomware will encryt files on external drives (or a NAS) first.
@@ExplainingComputers - Yet Microsoft Windows is now using "File History" that can keep your backup drive(s) constantly running instead of just spinning up once late at night to do a backup. And all these "little" File History backup files can impose even more wear on shingled (SMR) drives. It doesn't seem right to me.
@@ElmerFuddGun According to Computerworld, File History is turned off by default. If it's a threat or nuisance, just don't turn it on.
I agree with your final take on backup strategy. It is the key!
My approach is quite similar (except data size - my archives are much smaller).
I classify my data into following categories:
"mobile" (copy should be available on all my devices) - around 100MB
"laptop" (copy should be available on laptops and desktops) - around 200GB
"desktop" (only on desktops) - around 1TB
I classify my storage options in a following way:
"live" - data that I am currently using
"cloud" - Dropbox subscription as a backup and also automatic tool to sync between devices
"off-site" - WD Passport device that I use to take manual snapshots once a month and keep in a different place.
---
Regarding WD external drives. My first was WD Element 120GB that I bought more than 15 years ago. Never had any problems with it. It was a quite performant and reliable device. Now I use WD Passport 1TB and fully satisfied.
Thank you so much Mr. Barnatt for the explaining how to backup 👏🏻🙏🏻
best bang for the buck, very convenient, USB powered, reliable, external hard drive, since my first hard drive purchase 40 years ago
One possible reason for the bare 4 and 5TB 2.5" disks not being sold is a lot of laptops will only accept a drive 12mm or 9.5mm tall - the larger capacity drives are also thicker due to having more platters. Though if I were replacing a disk in a laptop I'd be likely to fit an SSD than another HDD - which ties in with your comment about market demand.
A very good point.
Exactly, the 5GB WD drive used here is 15mm tall afaik.
Most laptops don't even accept any kind of 2.5" drive now. They only accept M.2 drives.
Chris, you are so thorough! I love it. Please don't ever change... Joe
I have a WD Elements 1TB from 2013 and still works like magic at 99% Health and 100% Performance in HD Sentinel. My very first one, a tough drive and a great purchase! Now it's almost full of Movies from you know where, heheh... Nice review sir!
My backup strategy is:
Copy what you think is important to a USB thumb-drive whenever you feel the need to do so.
this worked perfectly fine until my brain started taking weird decisions without me knowing anything about them 😁😎
Thanks Chris, that was really helpful
I also use a similar case to house my back-up drives. Even did a video on dropping it 15 feet and drives surviving. Not that I recommend dropping them like that regularly, but it is good to know how protected they are.
I keep my drives in wine wooden box . Additionally, each of them is packed in a bubble wrap bag. Everything is encrypted by bitlocker.
you came along just in time ... I wait with bated breath before my old computer dies ...
I have the 2TB drive of the version that you have bought in this video. With my drive at least two things should be noted. When doing a surface scan test, the drive scan speed slows down dramatically towards the end of the test. The second regards the type of drive used in the unit and for those thinking of buying these drives to disassemble, as a cheap way to buy 2.5" drives.. The internal drive is non-standard. The width and length are the same as a standard 2.5" drive, but the thickness is 15mm. Another problem is that there is no SATA or Power connectors as the USB interface has been incorporated onto the controller board.
Thanks for sharing the wd elements drive demo. I have used WD drives and have never been sorry.
I wish I was that organised, I've always wanted an external drive. Maybe one day.
Lovely video. I myself am looking to update my external hard drives I use as my back up medium.
Strategy is perhaps the most important part! I’ve recently adopted the approach of annually buying a new drive and making a fresh annual backup and storing it offsite. I’ll end up with a pile of drives and hopefully some protection from “bit rot” through time.
I use the same WD Elements drive (2TB). I had this drive for a couple of years now..still works rock solid! These things are really good!
I've had the same wd book 3tb drive for like 10 years now. I still play games and watch movies off it.
Quite interesting, I lost one of my savefiles back on playstation one 25+ years ago because of a mistake, since then I started always having at least twice each savefile. This went further since then. Nowadays I've a professional 32TB Rack NAS from synology, a private windows 10 server NAS PC, more than 100 1 TB hard drives I back up my data once per month (as versions going back for years) and 5 external hard drives like you use. I've some of them storaged in a fireprove save in the home of my parents, the other at my home.
Since I've lost my save game in a PS1 game in like 1995 I've never lost any data ever again so it was worth it.
Finally another lover of the 5TB 2.5 inch HDD!
:)
Always a good day when Explaining Computers puts out a video 👍🏻
:)
I remember the first laptop I ever got which was a used Zenith Data Systems SuperSport 286e(Still have it in my collection), and it came with a 20MB HDD, and I don't even want to think about how expensive it was when it was new, now back in early 2020 right at the start of scamdemic I bought a Seagate USB 3.0 4TB External HDD for all of $80 USD, I have it formatted for Linux in Ext4, and it's been working wonderfully!!
As always Chris thanks for the great video, and for reminding me to do my monthly backups, which consist of the external HDD, some burned DVD/CD kept in a watertight CD case kept on a shelf up high out of sunlight, a few flash keys I keep in my fireproof safe, and some basic Google Cloud storage.
I'm a little surprised you didn't do a full block scan on the new drive prior to initial use. I always spend several hours performing an extended S.M.A.R.T block level scan as NTFS is awful at error detection. I've found that NTFS will happily write data onto bad blocks and you only become aware a file is corrupted when you actually attempt to read it back.
I came across this when verifying a backup written using AOMEI Back upper Verification wasn't the default option BTW, which is utter madness in my opinion). Anyway, the backup was done, but I was notified it had failed only because the newly created backup was verified i.e read back to ensure its integrity and it failed due to a spate of bad sectors.
There may be those out there running backup software without a verification option set and unaware their data may be compromised.
If some of those reading this comment out there are simply doing a COPY using Windows copy and paste, be warned that your data, if written onto areas of an NTFS filesystem formatted drive with bad sectors, will not fail. It's only when you try copying the file back or otherwise reading it that you will find it corrupted and useless.
I recently purchased two "recertified" Elements external drives direct from WD and so far they have been fine. I use one 10TB drive to back up all my VMs and personal data each day using the Linux programme "Back in Time" (maybe such applications may be worth reviewing Chris?). The second drive (4TB) I use to store my games and other stuff when I need more storage; both are connected via USB3 so they are nice and fast. If you look at the drives' SMART data, it's clear that WD have reset some of the parameters but so long as they continue to work, it's all good.
I *always* do something I like to call 2FB (two factor backup) basically it's a physical drive backup stored under physical lock and key - and ALSO backup to the cloud, such as dropbox.
As the backups guy at work, I’m going to be all over this. Ours is a much larger enterprise of 1.2PB disk arrays and 12-13 TB per night, but the principles are unchanged.
Very good video and advice as usual.
I use a Raspberry Pi 400 with an external USB 128 GB pen-drive attached for all my day-to-day files and a second 128 GB pen-drive in my drawer (which I back-up to every month or so).
For my larger files that includes my Music, my Family Photo's, and my British Radio Comedy Collection (all the Goon Shows, Tony Hancock, Dad's Army, Steptoe and Son, Alan Partridge, etc, etc), I have replaced my two 15 year old 1TB Maxtor USB external HDD's with two 2TB HDD's from WD Elements and Toshiba. I have tried two different types in case one of them lets me down. Neither has as yet but had I viewed your video at Christmas, I think I would have opted for both of them being WD Element (especially as this model seems to be a little more responsive than the Toshiba - however only time will tell).
Thank You For Explaining the many variants of these drives.
I like your bkp strategy. And I like the good old DVDs too, for very important data. In order to backup a common PC, I would suggest a small NAS with 2 HDD in raid, + an encrypted cloud (SpiderOak is good for that). And DVDs. DVDs last decades.
Thanks for tis. I do still use some DVDs and M-Disc BRs. :)
I would advise using seagate drives in this case because they still use a standard 2.5 15mm drive inside, WD uses a soldered usb connection so you lose the option to install the drive in a PC directly or swap the case if the usb connection fails.
You made a good decision using WD Drives, I've never had any problems with them, Western Digital makes excellent hard drives (At a very affordable price, and they lasts for years, as long as you are careful with them, I had some drives, well over 10 years, and they still work fine), and so does SanDisk as well, which WD owns. What's so nice about you purchased, is, you don't need a separate power source anymore (Less Is More) to use it, just plug it in, get data and keep it moving. 5 tb on a 2.5 inch drive is awesome, so tiny, yet so powerful. Have a good rest of your weekend Christopher, as I always say keep up the excellent work and As Always, Be Smart and Stay Safe.
On point as ALWAYS MR BARNATT!!!! KEEP UP THE GREAT WORKK!!!
Thanks for this Dr. Chris . . . It's always good to think (or re-think) about backing up strategies, although you're obviously much more disciplined than most of us! . . . I was really hoping by now that we'd be using equivalent sized SSDs, but the price is still prohibitive. 🥺
For a good price of $220 to $230, you can get a Crucial X6 4.0TB SSD and you can rest assured that there's no moving parts.
Had my third one of these delivered today which will backup my photo/video rework desktop. I have always backed up my infrequently used 4 towers to 4x WD mains powered external drives and to multiple 3.5 satas but then decided to back up all 4 of them to 2x WD Elements 5tb. So now have 3 copies of historic data and with this new third drive I will be backing up the machine I use daily to 2 of these elements drives. So funny that my first backup was also a WD 320 external.
I also (with trepidation) remove any supplier software and avoid large externals with encrytion. My biggest takeaway from your video is that I really must take one copy off site and that I can and should use my encryted thumb drives for my financial data. I agree that these 5tb drives are excellent value and perform well and I even store and operate them within their original plastic enclosure and boxes making a small hole for the usb lead. N.B.obviously not for longer than minor incremental backup as they could overheat.
You should make a 20 minute backup video just banging a drum and chanting ‘RAID is not backup’. The internet needs to hear it.
I so, so, so, so agreed! And to which I would add "NAS (alone) is not backup" as well! :)
Backup and more backup. Never know when you need it. Dead harddisk, virus and other accidents. When it happens, you don't lose data. Worth the effort.
Please mind the USB port is often integrated with the mainboard of the drive. If it is broken you can't disassembly the case and plug broken drive to PC to recover data. WD likes very much this solution. I also recommend to avoid SRM drives.
Yes, care does need to be taken with the USB ports on these drives. But if you run a system where no single drive failure can ever result in data loss, it is not a massive issue.
Is there any way to recover the data if it gets broken?
first Explaining Computers video I've watched in a long while.
I've always been wary of using USB drives for backups, especially WD ones, because they are hard to recover data from due to USB controller being integrated into the drive and more prone to failure than the drive itself.
Yep. The only form of USB drive I use is an external enclosure with an internal drive installed in it. Should the bridge chip get fried or die, I am still likely to get to the data on the drive using another enclosure, or connecting it to a SATA port.
This is why the Seagate versions of these are better. They're just standard SATA drives in an enclosure.
I had no idea about the differences, but glad to be informed. I use seagate BUP 5TB externals, because I can get them for $100 USD at my local Costco warehouse.
I suppose if you follow a 321 backup strategy then the idea of recovering data from a broken drive is redundant.
Dude, I just bought it and now I regretted it before the product even arrived
An extraordinary capacity for the price. Definitely an item that's going on my tech shopping list, in the near future.
Also, never assume your backups are complete. You should restore completely to a second system from your back ups occasionally to test them. I worked for a company that went bankrupt because a program was keeping a maintenance file open and it was not getting backed up. Test test test!
Totally agreed.
Rocking the Waifu2x program. Very cultured ExplainingComputers, very cultured indeed.
With the acquisition of a 'dead' PC, I'm up to about 4-1/2 TB local storage, having recovered a 1TB Toshiba (DANGER WILL ROBINSON) from it. Quite the change when in '99 I had an amazing 12GB storage over several machines. Of course, these days 128GB TF memories are at 18 bucks Canajian. Compare to the 64K memory chips I bought in '92 for a hundred bucks!
SBCs aside, this is my favourite topic as well.
I just purchased this drives 4 tb brother yesterday to back up my data too! Perfect timing for your video. I too will delete the software that came on the drive. I noticed that there are really no drives bigger that 5 tb for sale at best buy.
Hard drives and storage have definitely gotten cheaper over time. I remember when for that $100, you could only buy a 500GB External Hard Drive, and a 1GB USB costs over $20.
Are you kidding!?
My first hard drive was 20 Megabytes and cost me $600. Did you faint? LOL
I recall purchasing a 400MB drive from Computer City for $289.
In 1984/5 I bought a 10MB external HD, from the US, for an Apple IIe which cost almost $1,000 (inc. shipping to UK).
Times certainly have changed!
@@daveseddon5227 You get the prize! I remember ads for that. That is why I thought 20 Meg for $600 was a bargain. I hooked mine up to an IBM PC.
My friend's first HD was a whole 3 MB it was designed for a Pet computer and he used it for his Commodore 64, I remember it cost quite a bit of money even though it had light usage already,
I have similar drives, but mine are segate 5T usb. I have two of them and run a simple rsync command as a cron job late every night to copy the data. No offsite storage, but my data is not that critical. In the 90's I used tape drives. I alternated between 3 different tapes. The tape backup did save me one time when my computer was stolen. I was able to get a new computer with the same tape drive, and I restored everything using one of the backup tapes. That was a really good system as the tapes were relatively cheap and easy to deal with.
Speaking of drives internal or external... A video on the pros/cons of CMR/SMR drives would be interesting. Eg. How to find what type of drive you have? Speed/Nas or OS issues.
A good idea -- noted. :)
Great to see someone so excited by being able to keep using the same Pelican case because the drive's the same size ! :-) Just like me.
One thing to improve upon, and something that pretty much everyone who talks about backup tends to miss/skip - is testing that the backup does indeed work. Running a program that tests the files in location A vs location B, bit by bit would be a good way to do it.
Yes, indeed -- backups need to be verified.
Good strong backup strategy.
One thing to think about is to also have a tested restore strategy. I used to audit management systems in the good old days before retirement, and I did come across a client that had to restore some data after a failure but it didn't work so it cost them a lot of money to get in specialist to unravel the problems, 3 days of down time.
After that they devised and tested a restore strategy and it could be done in a few hours , not days.
I don't trust mechanical hard drives, so I did the same as you have done, but with ADATA HD710 Pro 2TB, which are $69.95 at Amazon. It is true, that I don't have the requirement for 5TB backup drives, but the drives I use are far more rugged than a spinning drive. It just makes me feel better.
I had that type of 2.5" caddy bay for my gaming rig way back in the day, with it's mini USB port.
The problem with those drives and others, is that the USB connector is part of the disk. If the connector breaks, or the USB circuit stops working, then the disk inside is unrecoverable. There was a time when the internal disk could be taken out and used from its own internal SATA connector.
I just looked at those. Thanks!!! Great video.
I remember spending a lot of time planning a backup strategy, even going down the rabbit hole of trying to learn about other file systems (ZFS always seemed like an interesting option).
I ended up using restic with the 3-2-1 rule. There's no need to make things complex...
Thank you for promoting backups
Thanks for your support. I try to drop in a backups reminder now and then. :)
My backup strategy is a bit insane. ☺ My main workstation is a Linux box, and I use RAID-1 everywhere. That's not a backup strategy, but it does help guard against drive failures. In fact, all my machines have software RAID-1 (except for laptops). Disks are so cheap there's no reason not to do that.
I have two USB drives in RAID-1 attached to my workstation; everything gets backed up to those daily.
I have a Raspberry Pi 4 with two RAID-1 USB drives; everything gets backed up there daily as well.
And finally, the RPi 4 backs itself up every night to a similarly-configured RPi4 with two RAID-1 USB drives at my sister's place; that's my offsite backup.
I also have a PC in my living room with RAID-1 SATA drives and my workstation backs itself up to there nightly as well.
For the Pi backups, I keep versioned backups by date. Because rsync doesn't touch unmodified files, I first hard-link all of yesterday's backup to today's and then rsync over it. This lets me keep many day's worth of backups while only using disk space for one full backup plus the daily increments. I prune the backups so I keep one backup for the end of each month going back to November 2021 as well as the most recent 7 daily backups.
Sounds like you are well covered. :)
Great video Chris, loved it!! I had to remind myself about your previous video "Cyber Security: Backups & Encryption" and I am glad I did. My WD HDD failed recently and I use the 3-2-1 backup solution. I quickly purchased a new HDD backup drive, as I have a lot of pictures and MP3 tracks for my DJ software. Looking forward to future videos, keep safe!
I have TB of archived data, each kept on mirrored pairs of USB disks. In one sense there are only 2 types of disks; a broken disk and a disk that will break sometime in the future. By keeping dual archives I reduce the risk of loss from 100% to < 0.1% (both disks failing before I can copy the data).
I just had a WD Elements 5TB drive fail two months before the 2-year warranty expired. It still worked, but was louder than my laptop fan. I received a refurbished replacement from WD in about two weeks. That was much better then two Seagate USB drives that failed several months after the 2-year warranty expired. Since I have had three USB drive failures in the third year of operation, I am going to switch from the Elements drives with the 2 year warranty to the WD My Passport for the 3-year warranty.
YAY, STANLEY!!! Hooray for Stanley the Knife! What a good, reliable knife. ♥️
Anyway, it's kind of wild how hard drives, including those with terabytes of storage, have gotten cheaper in recent years. I checked out the link for the MyPassport portable drive and HOLY CRAP, almost $55 for 1TB?! That's cheap all things considered.
As for how I back my data up, well, I'm gonna get my ass kicked for this but I've been using cloud-based services to back up my stuff ever since I was still a chronically broke teenager. Art, pictures, game data... The works. I still regret not backing up certain stuff from my old Acer laptop to the cloud before it went to silicone heaven. 😭
So yeah, I should really consider investing in some portable hard drives for my data back-up shenanigans. I know they also make ones especially for gaming stuff which I need to consider investing in as well.
Excellent video as always!
Thanks for your support. Stanley is reliable indeed.
@@ExplainingComputers You're welcome! And let's not forget Mr. Scissors. :)
Wonderful video! Your passion for storage is infectious! Video suggestion if I may - I visited the Derby Computer Museum yesterday and it was fantastic (lots of computers from the 70s, 80s and 90s). Perhaps a visit could be the subject of one of your videos?
I'd be really careful what kind of data you copy to this WD drive. The flimsy USB Micro B plug/socket is very sensitive to mechanical stress when handling the cable. I had a broken WD Elements just after warranty expired and also used to work in a company where we had several broken WD Elements drives. The drive uses a special (very thin) PCB which is made out of plastic and therefore can not even be re-soldered when the USB socket comes partially off (and it will if you unplug/replug often). The drive is a special version which has the USB connector on board and no SATA connector, so you will not even be able to remove the drive from the case and read its data via a SATA connection.
Really good explanation of backup strategies, I do like your scripts and your British English... 😊
Another great video Chris about something that we all perhaps should be more attentive with! (guilty as charged)...
Thanks for your support -- most appreciated as always.
This is good advice to all. But pain is also avoided by applying a VERSION backup process.
I use sync software that permits versioning, and so inadvertent or undetected corruption or errors in a file can be rolled back. A pure backup might save the corrupted file... Which would be pointless.
Also the schedule of backups across the different devices is important to ensure a full backup is on each device.
Heavy data use at work demands a risk based pyramid schedule, so daily backups can be incremental, maybe weekly too. But full backups are done monthly.
And in each case the number of versions to keep is adjusted to nest the frequencies. E.g. dailies can be kept for 14days, weeklies for 6 months, so on.
With camera resolution generating gb sized videos, after a few years the dependence on devices to keep your media safe is scary, especially with the time overhead to start new ones ...
You could also use the cloud. With many people just using phones to create media this might be their only backup. That would scare me.
The old mantra of different TYPES of device is maybe important too e.g. ssd or optical... and others have noted their resilience and longevity means they should be replaced frequently even if they are just sitting there.
But you should always test the RECOVERY of files frequently, especially using backup software, as corruption of that is also possible.
The best policy is kiss, don't rely on software that creates its own proprietary volume whether encrypted or not. I admit with Vera that is not possible.
The 123 mantra started in the era of floppy disks when the drive itself could murder a disk and when the floppy was also used for original material. Hence putting disk 2 in to fix the problem might just murder that disk, leaving you with the 3rd disk intact (assuming you realise in time!)
Nowadays the mantra remains valid to optimise the probability of recovery versus the cost or value of the material you are saving.
So maybe the first advice would be, don't save useless crap! And so regularly purge your files for duplication and stuff you no longer need.
Well that escalated quickly...
What is this sync software
@@rysterstech Allway sync. Now called Goodsync. Not sure what changed but my old version is very customisable and reliable.
I like the consistent format of your videos. 👌
Great video again Chris! Just a note to everyone to be wary of WD's WD5000LPSX 500GB Mobile Black drive. I was unlucky enough to purchase one direct from WD after I saw it was listed as a performance drive...sadly, nothing could be further from the case as unlike their earlier Black 500GB drive in this form factor, the new drive uses SMR technology. Performance is dreadful and quite unlike any other WD Black drive I have purchased.
I think all 5TB 2.5in external HDDs will be SMR now. Not necessarily a problem if you intend to back up be incrementally adding more files over time. Very possibly a problem if you expect to modify significant amounts of existing data on the drive.
@@jamietaylor5570 Nowadays probably all drives bigger than 500MB are SMR.
I have one quite new singleplate WD 1TB. I wondered why it is so slow. My old 250MB and 500MB drives are faster. I finally found out it is SMR
@@olaf3174 There plenty of high-cap 3.5in non-SMR drives around but you have to be careful what you buy and with external drives there is generally no guarantee as to what's inside.
@@jamietaylor5570 I mean all drives 2.5 bigger than 500MB
There's nothing wrong with SMR drives as long as you use them as originally intended. Seagate named their original 8 TB SMR drives "Archive" for a reason. Just write to them sequentially and they are no trouble at all. SMR as a technology got its undeserved bad reputation thanks to Western Digital who started branding them for applications for which they were not suitable, namely "the Red debacle", which they tried to hide, then lied about and eventually were forced to admit to. I like to use Toshiba hard drives when I can get them.
Those StarTech caddies are great. At the time I bought them Amazon was selling them with the dock for less than just the drive caddies alone so I have loads of these things.
StarTech did bring out a USB 3 version, but I recall them being in the £40-50 region which I think was too expensive. A shame they made they so expensive.
I liked that they used the SATA connector when docked but you could still use standard USB to just plug it in anywhere if you didn't have a system with the dock to hand, someone put some thought into designing them.
We agree!
I've bought some 3.5 inch StarTech caddies!
After failing to properly back up a database in the 1980s on floppy disks and had to re-type a lot of data, I've religiously taken backups.
I now use mirroered NAS (different vendor and hard disk) and until recently still used an LTO tape robot.
I also use cloud storage providers, in particular Amazon, that offer 11 nines of durability (redundancy) for some critical data.
I couldn't accept the risk of using a single vendor and a collection of drives as my backup strategy.
Could you introduce us to Ms Emery Board in a future video? She does a nice job of keeping your nails tidy and deserves a place in the spotlight with Stanley and Mr Scissors.
Thanks for this, much appreciated. Not least because another comment here says that I don't cut my nails!
He's got better nails than mine, not gonna lie! 😅
I've largely abandoned 3.5" disks altogether, because I don't see them scaling well with the physical size of today's computer machines.
I have three of those ST5000 Seagate disks; I use one with my 4k camcorder (using 1MB sectors) and the other two in my main rack-mount 1U NAS in RAID1.
If you ask me, 2.5" disks are far more practical than 3.5"; but the achilles heel is when you hit drive thickness issues, especially in multi-disk caddy/tray setups. The ST5000 is 15mm thick, which is its limiting factor.
Good morning, gentlemen. Am I the only one who still uses DVD-RAM for my backups (along with external HDs)? 😂😂 I have 3 external Western Digital HDs and they are pretty reliable all these years.
I used it for some time -- and also for TV recording, using the carts. A great media.
🤗😺😎i have too, not mentionned, that's just because I have those 8Gb dvd for long all new, but not having the use for them, external hard drives came, and time had let them in my library. They are All lightscribe. Times are changing, So....
My project last year was checking if DVD-RAM worked with ZFS. Spoilers, it does!
Good video Chris! Thank you for always sharing with us!💖👍😎
I've used a 3TB version of this as my Plex Server hdd for years. Bought another one about a year ago for my Xbox One. They're great drives!
I bought a 5TB Seagate USB drive a few years ago, tore it apart, exposed the SATA connector and put it in my laptop. It took some creative work to get it to fit physically because it was a non-standard height, but it's still nice to have a 5TB spinning drive for stuff that can be slow as well as a 1-2TB SSD.
Thanks for another interesting video! When you said you are going to open the drive I really hoped you would open the case, not just the package. :) I don''t like these kinds of external drives very much as the USB controller and socket seem to be directly on the drive's PCB. This means that if the socket ever gets damaged (e.g., when you handle the drive roughly while plugged in) you will probably have a hard time getting your data back. I'm still using a regular 2.5" drive in an external case for this reason. Looks like I will have to look for an alternative when buying the next drive, though.
Thanks for this -- and I agree that regular drives in caddies are a better solution, if possible. However, no failure of a single drive can ever result in data loss if you run an effective backup strategy. So if a connector fails, I will always be able to access my data -- on the three or more other drives on which it resides. :)
Your channel is exemplary in regards to teaching and presenting, Kind of reminds me of the old DK Eye Witness series.
A bit disappointed wd external drives can't be "shucked" as their sata ports are soldered to another board managing the sata to usb connection.
I have 4 WD HDDs and I backup my home directory in all of them every time with Deja Dup and encryption on. I keep everything simple and a program that is designed for home backup and easy to use.
$100 for 5TB!
Think back to 1985 (ish) ---- $1100 for 1MB!!!
Oh how the world has changed!
To use an old joke: How do I spell relief? B-A-C-K-U-P. I've been there where a critical file became inaccessible when the laptop I was using crashed and I didn't make a back up. Fortunately, we were able to recover the file and even though it was corrupted, at least I had something to work with while I was rebuilding the file. This was a manual intended for training purposes in the department I was working in at the time.
It's great that you're doing these videos where you're reviewing the latest product. I appreciate the unbiased approach you take and that you're keeping it nice and simple for easier understanding.
I wonder what strategy you are using for the actual backups. Maybe you can make another video about that.
Making backups (except maybe in the case of making backups of video projects) is not simply a matter of copying your data directory to an external drive.
You want to keep versions, so you can go back to last month's version when you notice today that 3 weeks ago you damaged a file, but you already made 3 backups after that.
Also, you want to have some lifetime on those backups so that data is not needlessly kept for a very long time. It may also depend on the actual data whether you want that or not.
(you want to keep your old documents "forever" but not your operating system software)
It would be interesting to know what kind of software you use for it, for Windows and Linux, and how you configure its settings.
Another video as you say! :)
i'm still using this WD element 1TB since 2014..still working perfect..health condition 70% (Hard disk sentinal pro test)
5 TB WD external hard drive is $ 112.5 in India