[SOLVED] back up hard drive question

rgs80074

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Oct 28, 2010
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Hello Everyone,

don't really need to get into many specs for this question.

I have a pc thats set up as the homes media center using plex.

I am a paranoid lunatic and the last thing i want to do is have to spend huge amounts of time redoing anything so as i fill up a hard drive with data I have another drive attached doing an exact copy and one its full that extra drive is removed and placed in storage.

so theoretically if any drive fails I have a backup that can quickly be copied to a new drive.

here's my issue the other day I was reading researching something else and I can not remember what but there was a mention that hard drives that just sit while they don't go bad the data starts to fail after (i think it said 5 years) and should be erased and rewritten every so often.

thats my qustion, how often should this be done or if its even needed, I've never heard of it before and never experienced this issue that i know of (at least not on hard drives, burned optical discs yes) and some of my hard drives are going on 10 years old but think the majority of them are 5 years or newer.

all these hard drives are just standard hard drives, i might have an hybrid but we'll just assume they are all just the old mechanical drives, know some are 7200rpm but seems more of the newer ones are 5400rpm's but much larger in size

thanks

ryan
 
Solution
I think I see you are making backups pretty close together, weekly perhaps?, you are doing a great job! I stored HDDs a few years myself without any problem restoring from them. To me, the weakest link is during the backup or restore (when Murphy's Law can kick in) or accidentally dropping or bumping a backup drive.

Lutfij

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thats my qustion, how often should this be done or if its even needed
In all honesty, I have retained my data on drives that have been connected and lying idle for pretty much a good part of 3 years and I have not had to rewrite any data to it.

If you're very critical about the drives, just make sure your data(that which is critical at least) is backed up and that you take note of any clicking noise coming from your harddrives. Also, worth mentioning is that a bad quality PSU can and will take out much more than itself, so it pays dividends when you invest in a quality PSU.

some of my hard drives are going on 10 years old but think the majority of them are 5 years or newer
As mentioned above, if you notice a strange noise, click or buzz from the drive or an anomaly while retrieving data from the older drives, it's time to back them up and replace with a new drive.
 

rgs80074

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well the backup of the drive (once full) is pulled from the system and placed in storage while the main drive sits in the home media center system.

I just read somewhere that after some time the drives will start to lose data integrity at a 1-3% but It didn't say much and I had never heard of that before especially for drives that are just sitting not being used.

then I started thinking it would suck to buy all that extra drives to have a one to one duplicate and then if the main drive fails the backup is bad as well without ever really being used much.

tried finding it again to give me an estimated time frame on when it starts to happen but could not find the article again.

which is why I decided to ask the question.
 
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RolandJS

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I think I see you are making backups pretty close together, weekly perhaps?, you are doing a great job! I stored HDDs a few years myself without any problem restoring from them. To me, the weakest link is during the backup or restore (when Murphy's Law can kick in) or accidentally dropping or bumping a backup drive.
 
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