My external drives are given a letter, just like the internal drive is. Would that be enough?
Bob
It is rather easy to detect the what type of drive is mounted to a given letter, but ask your buddy that uses it, I selected another because of carbonite's statement about "internal drives". Backblaze and Moxy both back up external drives and Moxy has an additional plan to do NAS drives as well.
To use your bandwidth for backups to an online site is somehow very wasteful. Hard drives are cheap and easy to use. I spend bandwidth on streaming movies and music. My home network would be slowed to a crawl by online backups. Its not the wisest use of resources. It could be used very late at night and early in the morning but even then to spend recurring fees (money) on what is so easy and cheap to do yourself just feels wrong.
Actually, I don't even notice it when it backups, but I do have a reasonable good connection with unlimited bandwidth. Any good online backup product will let you throttle or pause if you think it's consuming too much bandwidth. What's difficult about online backups is the restore process so it is still important to have a local backup if waiting a few days for the restore process to work. Online backups will also allow you to recover in the event of theft or fire.
But consider this... Assume you need 4TB of storage for your media. A 4TB drive is around $200 for 2 2TB internal drives (JBOD,RAID0,independent,etc), or $300-500 for a $4TB external drive. I personally want my backup drives separate from the computer, but at a minimum, it's $400 to have a backup solution assuming you have the drive bays, in this case I assume you would have 5-6 HDD bays. If you are drive bay challenged, you will need two external drives for both the data and backup which will run you at least $600 but most likely $800-1000 range. Adding an unlimited online backup solution for $50/year is really inexpensive assuming you have a reasonable ISP that has a reasonable upload speed and doesn't limit bandwidth.
Online backups will take several weeks if not months to backup 4TB of data, and you clearly don't want it to backup
data that changes frequently, but fore music, video and photos, this is a reasonably good solution for an automatic backup product. But I do value the time it took me to rip my music and I would annoyed if I lost all of my top gear episodes and I still do a local backup.
Maybe in a few years when hi-rez and lossless files are readily downloadable, stores hopefully will start to offer cloud storage for your hi-rez purchases and backups solutions won't be as expensive.
