External Hard Drive - for my MacBook Pro

Let me know your thoughts on these three.

  1. Apple Airport Time Capsule
  2. G-Tech G Drive
  3. Lacie Rugged Raid

Let me know if one of these you would suggest, or another one.

What are you looking to do with it?

I am going to invest in DEVONthink for starters. Then I want to be able to back up everything on an external hard drive, besides the back up in iCloud. Many people are telling me to back up everything on an external hard drive, because you cannot trust 100% on iCloud or Dropobox. Your thoughts? & thank you for responding :slight_smile:

In that case, I would probably get two plain old USB 3 hard drives, preferably bus powered (they draw power via the USB port, rather than requiring a power brick). Use one for Time Machine and get a copy of Carbon Copy Cloner and clone your hard drive to the other one.

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Most of the rotational drives I have seen come with a USB 3 micro type B port and a micro type B to USB 3 type A cable.

If connecting to one of the newer MacBook Pros with USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 ports, you will either need a USB-A to -C adapter or, alternatively, pick up a few USB 3 micro type B to USB type C cables.

I’m now tmsure if this is becoming the standard but at least one brand of portable SSD (Sandisk) I recently purchased, comes with a type C port on the drive and a USB-C cable that included a small type C to type A adapter.

Like @ChrisUpchurch, I’d go with a portable USB 3 drive. But you could buy one drive and partition it in two, one for TM and one for a clone.

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I would absolutely advise against that. One drive failure would wipe out both backups.

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@ChrisUpchurch ideally, you’d have 3, one for TM, and two for clones that you rotate somewhere outside your house. But in the spirit of saving some cash, I proposed one drive, partitioned in two. The chances that your internal hard drive, and your external one, and both partition crash at the same time is in my opinion pretty slim. I’m not saying two is not better, just saying for partability and cash, 1 might be enough. And since he also has his data in Dropbox AND iCloud.

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I’ve had very good experiences with Seagate externals powered over USB. Tiny, capacious and speedy (enough). For just over a year I’ve had a 4Tb Seagate Backup Plus USB 3.0 Portable External Hard Drive hanging off my iMac. Currently selling for $98 on Amazon, $1 less than I paid (at NewEgg, on sale at the time).

I chose this drive because the mechanism was found to be less problematic than others according to the quarterly Backblaze hard drive failure stats - their latest one is here:

I’ve had good experiences overall with Seagate. I also have 8Tb Seagate externals that have worked flawlessly since 2016.

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I am a fan of Samsung T5 SSDs, and have several – for Time Machine, clones, and external backup of photos and other key documents. As SSD drives, they are very fast, quiet, reliable; and the small lightweight size is easily portable.

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The Samsung external SSDs are fast. And prices have dropped significantly in recent days - the 1Tb model is $199 now. I recommend them, and their lack of moving parts makes them especially useful for someone crrying storage around. But if you need large amounts of storage hard drives are still the price champs. For less than the price of the Samsung 1Tb SSD you could get the Seagate 8Tb external I linked to above (although that specific model is not a USB-powered drive).

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I agree with ChrisUpchurch. USB drives are inexpensive. Two drives provide backup and redundancy. In addition, Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner tend to expand their disk space requirements over time due to their incremental method of writing to the disks.

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All the options you listed are good choices and having multiple backups is smart. I have used LaCie drives for over 20 years and have never been burned by a dead unit. Upgraded to larger capacity models. Yes they cost more than other brands, but I feel comfortable knowing my data is safe and accessible.

Dave