You've been extremely helpful and I refuse to keep going any further as someone who owns and curates valuable digital media without adopting new backup procedures. That's it, I'm done being careless. A few years ago, I lost an entire 500GB of incredibly difficult to find music and music I had spent a LONG time capturing from LPs and 78s. In that moment, when I realised I had lost it all, the first thing I thought of was the time tagging everything. The music, in some way or another was recuperable, slowly. But the time tagging was something I'd never get back.
Therefore, in light of my new best practices, let me just ask you one last thing, just to see if I'm getting this backing up methodology down... I'm thinking of doing the following, 3 HDDs:
Main drive in the computer - A
Second drive in another bay, powered, connected - B
Third drive, offline, not in computer at all - C
I don't write to A enough to warrant daily updates/backups, but I'd say twice a month couldn't hurt. Plus, if any particular week I get tons of tagging done, then it would prompt an in-between back up just to update all that work. (with discographies, this can get heavy)
Then (I got this from someone else) every few months, rotate which one is the A, the B, and the C (I think the idea is that then no drive ever sits for too long without being powered, but to me I wonder if that's even an issue with hard drives). Let's assume they do get rotated, I'm thinking these should all be HDDs that CAN be used as daily work drives (listening to music, watching videos from them). Because if A craps out one day, B should be able to go into its place and be a drive that can be read from regularly and not have any head parking or any other such feature that makes it only useful as a storage drive. No? Side question... typically, unless I'm wrong, electronic devices don't like being powered on from an off state. How does constantly re-waking a HDD affect it long-term?
How is all of that for a system? (..I'm trying, go easy on me...)