Solid State memory vs. portable HD

I'm still looking for viable backup alternatives that are simple and portable.
I'm planning on moving during this year, so I don't want to install anything fixed yet.

I was thinking on getting a portable HDD (Iomega or Lacie were recomended to me) but a friend working in IT suggested that a pendrive would be more reliable, but probably more expensive.

What's your experience with both systems?

Looking forward to your comments.

Regards

For size, safety, cost and reliability, I find that there's no beating Backblaze.com $5/month, unlimited storage. Plus, no backup system that has all the copies in the same building is safe from fire, flood, earthquake, or theft.

Thanks everyone for your suggestions!

After reading your tips I started looking into an online backup service, and I like the features of CrashPlan, it has an unlimited storage plan for ~USD 49/year, backing up even the removable storage devices.

@Tricky, CrashPlan advertises that in some of their plans they will send you a portable disk for the first backup, in order to avoid the transfer of such large files over the net.

There is no guarrantee that any on-line service is reliable. With home based backup, you can at least double up (i.e. 2x HDs). Although no backup is 100% reliable, by having redundancy you improve the odds: at least it will be under your control! I back up the whole of my computer to 2 1 Tb drives monthly using Vice-Versa, alternating the drives. I also make a completely independent back up of my photo files to both a 500 Gb HD and to DVDs.

I think I'm making up my mind on what to get, considering my plans for the near future.

- I will get a NAS drive for my home network (Probably iOmega Home Media Cloud Edition 1TB)
- I will keep using my Toshiba 750GB USB HDD for backup.
- I will get a CrashPlan service for online storage.

The reasons for this are:

- NAS drive will be easily accesible while connected at home and will keep my backup up to date almost constantly.
- CrashPlan client can handle both online backup and local backup, making it a single system to control.
- Online backup is slow, but it's off-site and accesible from all over the world.
- The portable USB drive adds redundancy to the backup system but will be updated quite less frequently.

As I mentioned in my first post, I will be undergoing a relocation during this year, probably moving abroad, so I don't want to install a full-blown local backup system now, but I do want to keep my data safe, both my pictures (that will take the most of the space) and my other data (documents, e-mail, etc.)

Yup, online backup isn't "fast", but it runs whenever the computer is on, and you can set how much bandwidth you want it to use. So if you're planning some heavy gaming for the night, just throttle the backup down. I have my online backup client running on my NAS, so it's a non-issue, but that's not practical for everyone.

However, I do take issue with suggesting that a local RAID is safer than having a local copy and a copy in a datacenter. The datacenter's copy will also be on a RAID, usually RAID5+1, but with someone there monitoring the HDDs for errors 24/7. It also has industrial fire suppression systems, battery backups and generators, seismic-safe building methods, water-tight construction, and armed guards. On top of that, unless you skip a piece of your shopping homework, it's in a different geographic region than your local copy. So a widespread disaster that destroys your local copy won't take out your backup copy too.

There's nothing wrong with having several copies at home, and it's a good idea because hard drives do fail. But a failed hard drive isn't a disaster. Flood, fires, earthquakes, wars, etc are disasters. Off-site backup is a key pillar to any Disaster Recovery plan. Certainly you don't *have* to have an offsite backup, and there are ways to do that without an online service (mailing a DVD/hdd to a friend in another city). Just remember that recovering data from an HDD damaged by fire is very, very expensive.

utcreeper wrote: However, I do take issue with suggesting that a local RAID is safer than having a local copy and a copy in a datacenter.

I made no such suggestion. I just stated what method I use.