jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

We all know it's importqant to backup your data, but what good is a backup that fails? Take a look at a failure report from a company that uses thousands of hard drives.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-buying-guide/

rmalarz Loc: Tempe, Arizona

One of the reasons I've transitioned all of my drives to HGST drives. One of my Seagates was giving me warnings regarding impending drive failure.
--Bob

pbradin Loc: Florida

You can be a total pessimist and just bury yourself in the knowledge that everything that we humans build will fail eventually. But if you backup your drives, then you would have to have two drives to fail at the same exact time to lose your data, photos, etc. The possibility of that happening is very, very small. If you want to eliminate that possibility completely, you would have to have several backup drives in several places miles apart for each drive to be backed up with 100% safety. Modern drives are amazingly reliable. I have 8 external drives connected to my computer for a total of 22 TB of storage. I have not had one single drive failure since I started playing with computers in any serious kind of way in 1994. I have had two drives arrive DOA, both bought from Walmart a couple of years apart about eight to ten years ago. Needless to say, I will never buy an external drive from Walmart again and please don't comment on my stupidity on buying them from Walmart in the first place. I learned my lesson. Yes, backups may fail, or the original drive may fail, but unless both drives are in your house and the house burns to the ground, then you are pretty safe using a single backup. I do not have my backups connected to my computer all the time. That way, if there is a major power surge that my protected power supply cannot handle, I may lose some data from the last couple of days, but the vast majority of my data (in my case photos) is safe.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

I had a drive do the same thing, a Seagate Barracuda drive as C:. I replaced it with a WD enterprise drive before it crapped out. I like Acronis! It did a great job of cloning the drive.

rmalarz Loc: Tempe, Arizona

I used clonezilla to do mine. I now have, basically, all new drives in my computer systems.
--Bob

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

I guess I've been lucky. I think I had one drive fail. Another naturally became unusable when it fell to the floor while doing a backup. I have lots of drives in use that are up to ten years old. Of course, they're redundant drives.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Interesting. I think that deserves a separate post question from me.

nadelewitz Loc: Ithaca NY

I agree with your advice, with one question:

Do you think that hard drives are made specifically for sale through Walmart, or for any other dealer? And that Walmart's are inferior or "seconds"? Brand-name major appliances models are "personalized" for big dealers, but I doubt it with hard drives.

Hard drives are an extremely delicate device to manufacture, and can fail at any time after they leave the production line. Fact of life. Just because. That's why computer data and camera data should never be entrusted to just one storage device if you can't afford to lose it. Hard drives, flash drives, memory cards, optical disks, whatever.

jaycoffman Loc: San Diego

Nice timing, my Seagate died yesterday and I've lost one important file (with about 1000 pics) off my computer. Yea, it's raining today. Oh well, just thought I'd add this to the discussion...

Joe 88

FIX IT https://www.ashampoo.com/en/usd/pin/0173/tools-and-utilities/photo-recovery YOUR INTO PHOTOS YOU NEED THIS. I JUST SAVE YOU $1000s have a GREAT 2019 anGODbless PASS IT ON

RainierView Loc: Eatonville, WA

I had a Seagate that failed under warranty. Long, long story short, they were no help. I'll never do business with them again.

I now use WD Passport, and the cloud.

lbrande

I have 5 seagates running right now 4 have been running since 2010, only 1 needing to be replaced. My C drive is a ssd. I only use Enterprise level drives.

rfmaude41 Loc: Lancaster, Texas (DFW area)

I also use Seagates, but, they are all Constellations (enterprise class drives), never had any one of the (8 altogether) fail in the last 5 or 6 years.