Need advice on which Ext. HD for Mac to buy

WD External Drives External Drives for Mac
1

I need advice on the best Ext. HD to buy for a new iMac I bought last December. It had minor problems with OS El Capitan, so I upgraded to Sierra trying to fix them. One year later, and hours wasted, I need to see if High Sierra is better but want to back up my files to something trustworthy, and divorce from iCloud
which ate one too many of my files, now gone forever.

Which External HD for Mac is more dependable and problem free?
Should I risk putting in High Sierra BEFORE backing up, or back up with Sierra in?
Are there any tips or tricks I need to know with WD. I have previously used a Seagate but heard WD has the best track record.

2

I am using a couple of 1 TB WD Elements for High Sierra and El Capitan. My Mac isn’t yet APFS formatted however I faced no issues yet. Whats your storage size requirement and anything specific?

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If you concern a lot of your data. You should get a WD DUO external drive. There are 2-3 different models and prices. If you just need something to back thing for now. Get any WD external passport drive. They go from $50-150 depending on drive size, connection (speed).

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I am not sure what you mean by APFS, sorry. I have not don’t anything on the newer Mac outside of trying to keep if from Freezing and eating my stuff the past year.

When you began using it, I assume you backed up with ElCapitan, then continued to back up with Sierra and High Sierra?

There are a lot of photos and graphics which I will need to down size later, but what I don’t want to lose most
are legal documents and research, or any work; I am a writer so there will be a lot of docments not as big as the graphics, but if I recall, I have about 40,000 of them (probably much of it are the dang duplicates this iMac keeps backing up and saving and putting who knows were until I do a search, then never know which is the original, which are copies.

You see, I have NEVER used icloud before I was forced to without my knowledge on this system. I have my own way of saving things and filing. I hate iCloud.

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So, the Duo is an external HD, that does NOT use iCloud? I do not want anything to do with iCloud at all.

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Check out “My passport pro no longer recognized after upgrade to Sierra” below – WD external drives are not playing well with the new iMac OS updates. My 4TB MyBook drive appears to have been bricked during the latest iOS update (to 10.12.6 – note, not “High” Sierra) and I now have the dread “virtual WD Unlocker” permanently encamped on my desktop and cannot see the actual WD drive partitions. Searched this forum, no solutions to be had.

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Thanks. Looks like it’s hit and miss for some of you. Which computer do you have? Laptop, MacMini, iMac or Pro Mac desktop?

I tried two Mac Minis before I thought IMac worked. Only a bit of a mail problem but did not realize before the 3 weeks were up that you cannot uninstall Safari, or Mail. If I had, it would have gone back also. Can you have two different Chrome Browsers on the same computer? Then I would not need Safari at all.

For the time being, I am backing up all my critical things to Google Drive.