Friend's iMac was compromised, and was recently de-mal'ed, nuked, repaved, and partially reconstructed at the local Mac repair shop. Told him to get new TM drive, since old one has about a month's worth of backups of the infection. Plan is to do a restore on another HDD of iMac's system prior to the intrusion, and use new TM drive to backup freshly repaired system. 2TB ought to be adequate. I found the 2TB Mac version Seagate Backup Plus for $70 on Amazon as the best deal so far. So other than that, as sub says, do we have a current favorite 2TB 3.5" external TM drive vis a vis price/performance/reliability?
Thanks.
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So if he's just gonna start over, why not just erase and reformat the old TM drive? might take all of 30 seconds? And thats free.

meh, doesnt matter.

Heres a 3TB for $80: [www.walmart.com]

I would probably go 2.5" instead, one less power brick/fan. 2 TB, $80

[www.amazon.com]

Im afraid to ask how much it cost him to get it "fixed". It wasn't an "infection" he let someone in. All the backups/software in the world wouldn't have saved him.

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Edited 999 time(s). Last edit at 12:08PM by jdc.

It cost him $90, and yes, he let them (the scamsters) in because they impersonated Sophos, and he fell for it. The old/corrupted TM drive has two partitions, TM on the big partition, and a the last clone of his 2006 C2D iMac, prior to its being replaced w/ the 2013 i7 iMac on the smaler partition. After I restore a copy of his pre-infected iMac, I'll purge the TM partition for him and replace it w/ the restored older copy per above, since some of his archives (primarily POP email) didn't get transferred. He just recently got hooked up w/ an IMAP account, and hasn't finished transferring all the POP archives to it. I figure 2TB is plenty for a new TM drive, but I'll forward that $80 3TB Toshiba you linked, since it's only $10 more for 50% more capacity.
Thanks.
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Dont partition the new drive. And I would still want the 2.5" drive. Silent, just plug and go. Easy to pop in a fireproof safe if you go on vacation too. Size of a deck of cards.

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Edited 999 time(s). Last edit at 12:08PM by jdc.

Not gonna partition the new drive, just the old one. Since he's kinda old (82 y.o.), getting w/ the program of stashing drives elsewhere is not a good fit for him. I have, and regularly use, a bunch of portable drives so I appreciate their utility. I sent him the link to the Toshiba you posted, but haven't heard back, and probably won't until mid evening.
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roll your own, gives you more choices.

I use the Protronic HDOCK-B (horizontal dock) from Amazon.

Takes 2.5" or 3.5", HDD or SDD up to 6TB and includes a power supply.

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/25/2016 05:59PM by MrNoBody.

> Do we have a current favorite 2TB 3.5" external TM drive?

HGST.

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Quote
MrNoBody
roll your own, gives you more choices.

I use the Protronic HDOCK-B (horizontal dock) from Amazon.

Takes 2.5" or 3.5", HDD or SDD up to 6TB and includes a power supply.

This. Many of the enclosures used by the big name drive manufacturers are fairly crappy. Get a decent enclosure and buy the exact drive you want. The last faulty Seagate I dealt with had a bad enclosure or bad connectors. Drive was a PITA to extract, but is functioning correctly in a better enclosure.