grichie5

Like many, I back up my hard drive regularly to an external hard drive. I have used the same external drive for the last five years or so.

They do have a limited life and do fail unexpectedly.

Is it good practice to change out external drives periodically, after a few years use, even if they're still working?

Or, is the Virus getting to me?

ELNikkor

The best way to anticipate the failure is to have 2 exact copies. If one fails, THEN you buy another and back it up with the other. They'll never both fail at the same time.

LarryFitz Loc: Beacon NY

Use a RAID device. It has two hard drives that backup each other. If one goes bad, you will get a failure message, then you and replace the damaged drive.

Believe it or not Loc: West Virginia

How do you check whats on your externam hard drive. I'm to old to get into this tech savvy, 90plus.

anotherview Loc: California

Can you recommend a RAID device?

NCMtnMan Loc: N. Fork New River, Ashe Co., NC

Any drive of any age can fail at any time. If that is your only backup, then I would suggest you purchase a new drive for your primary backup and put the current one in a safe place (preferably off-site) in case of a major incident. I prefer to use higher quality drives and purchase my own drive and purchase a quality external enclosure with a cooling fan and vents to aid in the cooling. They're easy to install. Then you should also consider using a cloud service for a daily scheduled backup. I use iDrive and find it to be very reasonable and easy to use.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

Depends on your operating system and how the backup was done.
My backups are simply copies of folders and files so I just use Windows Explorer to view the contents of the external drives.

larryepage Loc: North Texas area

Like solid state drives, spinning drives are generally much more inherently reliable than in past history. But they do fail sometimes. The two main points of failure are the drive motor (which we can't do too much about) and the read/write head systems. These are quite delicate, and they also have a quite fragile relationship with the disc platters. Storage density is so high that it only takes a small incident to create damage on the discs. Sometimes that damage can be mitigated or limited, and sometimes not. The read/write heads do not ride against the discs (like on a tape recorder), but float a tiny distance above them, on a cushion of moving air. So the problem then becomes the way that external drives are handled. After all, they are just a tiny box dangling at the end of a small cable.

My solution has been to stop using spinning drives in external enclosures. I now use only solid state drives in this way. No moving parts. No motor to wear out or fail, no read/write heads to crash against discs. Some will say that the SSDs are less reliable overall. That may be true, but I've not found it to be a problem. Some may say to use the spinning drives to occasionally archive everything, then put them in a safe spot on the shelf. I don't think that is necessarily a good idea either. When they sit for a long time, they can "stick" and refuse to spin up with power is applied.

There really are no complete guarantees in the world. The best you can do is to keep two copies in different locations and keep them both updated.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Please stop repeating or at least qualify this incorrect advice (3 threads in the last few days). Having a mirrored backup is certainly a safety measure, but double drive failures DO happen (lightning hits, power supply failures, line surges, fan failures, fire, flood...) and mirrored drives do nothing to protect you from file corruption, malware/ransomeware, viruses or accidental file or folder deletions.

You need 3 copies of your data: primary (working) storage, a backup for quick restore, and an off site disaster recovery copy, with snapshots or versioning to protect against accidentally deleted or corrupted files.

Regarding RAIDs. RAID in itself is not a backup, although a RAiD device can be used as a backup drive. There are long threads on this subject which I can post links to, but using RAID 1 (mirroring) is likely what is being referred to.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

👍👍 well said.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

Two drives can fail at the same time. A power anomaly can, and my experience has, taken out multiple drives. A fire, flood, theft, etc can lead to catastrophic data loss. One can mitigate loss by anticipating the situations that would cause data loss (other than a drive failure) and planning accordingly. Two drives in the same location connected to the same power source is not the best plan. The OP should listen to TriX and NCMtnMan, both of whom have experience on the computer side of things and are providing solid advice.

chrissybabe Loc: New Zealand

"The best way to anticipate the failure is to have 2 exact copies. If one fails, THEN you buy another and back it up with the other. They'll never both fail at the same time."

"Use a RAID device. It has two hard drives that backup each other. If one goes bad, you will get a failure message, then you and replace the damaged drive."

Two comments from earlier in this thread. I have had multiple times BOTH, that's BOTH, drives fail. Others have commented on the best procedure for making backup copies so I won't go into that here.

You can buy Raid 5 systems where if you have enough drives configured into it as spares and rebuild set on error you start to have a degree of safety. And if the raid box is designed properly you can also initiate rebuilds on demand which will weed out a few more possible failing drives. A Raid system like this is very expensive and probably out of most peoples budget. To be really safe after 5 years start cycling in a set of new drives. And do not take a possible failing drive out, test it and refit it. It failed for a reason - discard it.
You still need a backup as a setup like this is more to allow work to continue rather than as a backup.
This is the price of safety.
Systems like this can be had with dual or more power supplies and redundant controllers which will fail-over, even cables in pairs. As I said above not cheap.

kymarto Loc: Portland OR and Milan Italy

RAID drives are not the best solution to be honest. Whatever is written is written to both drives, and whatever is erased is erased from both. We once had a lot of very valuable footage lost when a write error overwrite the MBR of both drives. On a more mundane level, if you drop your raid drive chances are you will lose both. It's a bit more work but you are much better off to have two single backups. It is easy enough to write to one and do an incremental backup to the other. And then keep them in separate places. I speak from very sad experience, since we spent over $20,000 trying to recover material on that RAID drive without success.

coolhanduke Loc: Redondo Beach, CA

Yes, I would change out the drive periodically.
I backup to an 8 TB drive and a 2 TB drive I store and keep off location. The 2TB is having issues and needs to be replaced or re formatted.

Costco has SSD drives now at reasonable price. That’s the way to go.

Jimcamera Loc: Michigan

Look into purchasing a Gobo backup and storage system. You can install up to 5 hard drives and it has a double redundancy backup system.