External Hard Drive recommendation for imac

Hi Ladibuglee,

Since you really don't need an SSD for backup, an external hard drive will do. Anything here that Apple sells is great quality and will do excellent: Storage - Mac Accessories - Apple. Just don't get a USB flash drive, USB Superdrive, or a Mac Pro upgrade kit.

Cheers,

Jack

Apple sells SSDs some here, but they are kind of expensive: https://www.apple.com/shop/mac/accessories/storage?page=1&f=1to2tb&fh=3783%2B3ad7

You can get them cheaper somewhere like Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-T5-Portable-SSD-MU-PA1T0B/dp/B073H552FJ/

A standard magnetic hard drive might be better for backups due to cost, but could fail more easily.

Ladibuglee wrote:

Thank you for your suggestion. I am a new iMac owner (Windows convert); I was hoping to keep the drive connected to my computer 24/7 so it's always mirroring my activity, which is what I did with my Windows computer. Is that how this drive would be connected?

My main iMac has two of the Mercury Elites attached 24/7. One does Time Machine backups automatically, and the other drive uses Carbon Copy Cloner to create bootable full-drive backup once a day.

Apple Time Machine is already on your computer. Information here:

Back up your Mac with Time Machine - Apple Support

For a desktop computer like an iMac, an external drive holding a 3.5-inch drive and having an independent power supply is the most reliable.

Having had too much grief with "name-brand" externals that go on sale every other weekend, I now use only these for our desktop Macs. Most of the senior contributors here rely on them as well:

https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/owc-mercury-elite-pro

As long as the mechanical drive inside is rated at 7200 RPM and SATA 6GB/sec transfer speeds, it is more than fast enough for Time Machine backups once you make the first one.

Like Jack, I see no need for as SSD as an external backup drive. If you need to routinely boot and run your computer from an external, then the SD is appropriate.

Really about the best that is out there are OWC Mercury Elite Pro series. Dead reliable, easy to change the drive, great pricing, will last for many many years (I have some that are over 15 years old that work fine) and great service. You can find them by clicking OWC Mercury Elite Pro

Yep, get a 2 GB (or more!) drive and then set time machine up on it. It is not really a mirror, it will actually save older backups so that you can restore files that have been deleted. (Once you fill up the drive, it will delete older files to make room for new ones).

You can also get cloning software like SuperDuper! or CarbonCopyCloner if you want a more conventional mirror.

(The *best* solution is to get *both*)!

I use the same setup that Allan does and it works extremely well. The advantage of each is:

Time Machine: Does backups every hour of new or changed files. It keeps a history of everything on the computer. For example, lets say you want to restore a file from a specific date Time Machine will do this very easily.

Bootable Clone: You can schedule these to backup at a specific time and they are bootable. In other words, if the internal storage on the computer fails you can boot from the clone.

Advantages of using both methods: Backup hardware can occasional fail. It's unusual however it can and does occur. I had it happen years ago! It also has a habit of failing at the worst possible time. So having redundant backups is smart for just that reason. I'll give you an analogy: Would you trust your bank if you knew they only had 1 backup of your banking records??

+1 regarding OWC external SSDs.