Best external drive for "Acronis Survival Kit"
Would someone recommend good, inexpensive USB hard drives to serve as Acronis Survival Kits for these two machines.
I have two machines, both with near 500gb solid state drives only about 20% and 30% full.
If I have a 2TB external for each machine, would I be able to create a "survival kit" AND keep about 6-12 months of monthly full and incremental backups on the same drive?
Thank you for you knowledge and help.
Bobby in Houston
As Steve says, much depends upon the size of your backups and how often you wish to create them. In principle, you should be able to hold many backup of both PCs on a single 2 TB external drive. You wouldn't need to keep a separate external drive for each PC, as a single external drive can contain backups from multiple PCs.
I personally very much like Western Digital's products. I like their form, and I've found them to be very reliable. I like the WD Passport series which are 2.5" portable drives. They run off USB power, needing no external power supply, which is more convenient. And they are small, fitting easily into a pocket or a bank safety deposit box.
For ATI backups I use two WD Passport drives in rotation. I keep one at home for regular backups and one in a bank safety deposit box. Every couple of weeks I swap those drives. That way, even if I am robbed or suffer a fire or water damage and both my PC and external drive at home are lost, I have another backup drive in the bank safety deposit box with relatively recent backups.
Note: I backup at least weekly, sometimes every day when I am creating a lot of new work that I wouldn't like to have to redo. Monthly seems much too infrequent, unless you don't change much on your computer. Think about how much work you did on your computer in the last 30 days: if you lost all that work, would it be a problem? If it would, then I suggest backups more often than monthly.