Tuesday, October 10, 2017

hard drive - 2TB NTFS storage HDD, backup/mirror/sync to external HDD, software options/solutions needed

I have a 2TB internal HDD, with a single NTFS(Windows 7) partition used for storage purposes. I want to backup/mirror/sync it to an external 2TB HDD.



  1. From what I know that mirroring can be done only if the external HDD is connected all the time to the PC. If this is the case, I will exclude this option.


  2. Again, regarding backups, I know that they usually use a proprietary container file that makes an image of the drive. This would also pose some issues when updating the backup. If it's incremental(lack of space, due to the fact that you backup 2TB on 2TB, and there's no spare space for incremental containers), if you can access the data easily in case you need to, etc.


  3. Syncing, this seems for the moment the best option for me(ease of access in case of emergencies, less time involved, since it only copies the modified data, etc), but I have some doubts here also. How does the software decide what needs to be sync-ed and what doesn't need to?Does it start a CRC32 or byte comparison(this would take huge amounts of time for 2TB drives)?



Does the software have some options to verify that the sync-ed files are consistent with the source?


If I were to choose by myself, I'd go with syncing, but I hope that this isn't the case, and that you will share your experience and advice with me.


How do you backup such large amounts of data? What strategies and software do you use?

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