Question Backups to SSD or HHD?

[rytenuff]

I have two identical SSD Drives in my desktop PC. Every 3 months I clone my current drive to my backup drive then disconnect the backup drive. I do this in case I have a drive OS failure of some sort or a virus I cannot remove, then I would format that sick drive and clone to it from the backup which would only be 3 months out of date.
My questions are:
As SSD drives can only be written to a finite number of times will this cause premature failure of the backup drive?
Would I be better to clone to a HHD drive instead every 3 months as there isn't the same limit to writes as SSD?
I have cloned from an SSD to a HHD and found the HHD very slow to boot, much slower than you would expect a HHD to boot. 8 or 9 minutes.
As yet I have not attempted to clone from my HHD to an SSD so I don't know whether the slowness would transfer to the SSD.
Any advice appreciated.

 

[Grobe]

My personal favourite method is to use Clonezilla to clone OS disk onto an external hdd. That way you can store several disk images on the same drive.

ANd get this: Using Clonezilla, you don't have to make an drive-to-drive clone, but the clone is files in a folder, normally consuming just a little percentage of the disks total storage capacity.

 

[USAFRet]

I have two identical SSD Drives in my desktop PC. Every 3 months I clone my current drive to my backup drive then disconnect the backup drive.
...
My questions are:
As SSD drives can only be written to a finite number of times will this cause premature failure of the backup drive?

That level of writes to the SSD is of no consequence.
You'd have to do that every day, twice a day, for years to see any wear effect.

I use Macrium Reflect, and do nightly Full or Incremental images.
Can store a month or two of Images in the same space as a single full clone. Recover the drive to any date in the last XX days.
And get to use the rest of the drive as desired.

 

[jsmithepa]

If you are concerned about SSD failure, u should worry about the production one, the one that is constantly working while the machine is on. Your backup SSD, how often you do your backup? enuff said.

If backup SSD too slow (1)you should enable max compression, (2)Backup OS+Apps only, u maybe backing up unnecessary stuff. I separate DATA BACKUP vs DISASTER RECOVERY BACKUP. What you are doing is Disaster Recovery, the stuff that you need the machine to boot, OS configurations etc. If you have a huge folder of videos, those maybe backed up separately on separate schedules. My video library don't get changed often enough so I back those up every year, YMMV. My own DR backups take ~12 gig and no more than 15m to restore, again YMMV.

 

[USAFRet]

What is your backup situation at home?

What is your backup situation at home? And if you don't do that, why not? Every single day, I read multiple threads here of "How do I get my stuff back?" or "That drive had 5 years of photos of my kids!!" Be it a dead drive, dropped phone, virus, accidental deletion, formatting the wrong...

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