External hard drive question

[holyzombiejesus]

I currently have all my music on a 300 gb external hard drive which is plugged in to my computer. It's quite old now (at least 10 years old) and I occasionally think about backing it up. If I just got a replacement hard drive (they seem to be around £25) backed it up on to that and then just kept it in a drawer somewhere, does that sound like the best thing to do? Not really up on these kind of things.

[QDRPHNC]

That's what I do.

[Ferris]

Yup same here.

If you have an old laptop, you can take the hard drive out of that and pop it in one of these handy case things that turns it into a USB hard drive:



It's not that complicated (I managed it with my knackered Acer notebook and I'm a simpleton) plus saves a few quid.

[Spudgun]

Yes, storage is surprisingly inexpensive per terabyte these days, and what you suggest is exactly what I'd do.

If I just got a replacement hard drive (they seem to be around £25) backed it up on to that and then just kept it in a drawer somewhere, does that sound like the best thing to do? Not really up on these kind of things.

Not sure which way round you mean that, but I'd be 'retiring' the old one to the drawer and keeping your new one plugged in. That's probably what you were saying.

[holyzombiejesus]

Not sure which way round you mean that, but I'd be 'retiring' the old one to the drawer and keeping your new one plugged in. That's probably what you were saying.

Was going to keep the old one running until it bites the dust and then - ta daaaa! - put the new one in place. Thought that if the old one is on the way out then it might not be best to use a back-up.

[El Unicornio, mang]

Yes, storage is surprisingly inexpensive per terabyte these days, and what you suggest is exactly what I'd do.

for regular hard drives, yep. Got a Seagate BarraCuda 4TB for £80 new recently. Perfect for storing all the films and games I'm probably never going to watch/play again

I mostly use SSDs these days though and although the super fast speed is nice they're also 5x more expensive

[Malcy]

Was going to keep the old one running until it bites the dust and then - ta daaaa! - put the new one in place. Thought that if the old one is on the way out then it might not be best to use a back-up.

I have a few externals and recently did the same. Backed up all my music on to it, and moved stuff over from other drives to make some space and it failed a few weeks later! It still shows the files but accessing them is hit and miss. I really need to get a big massive one that will hold everything.

[touchingcloth]

I got lucky a few months ago when a drive with over 1TB of stuff on it failed partially so that it became read-only.

I make monthly backups to a 4TB drive now, which doesn't take long once you've done the initial seeding backup.

I'm going to wait for the old drive to fail or fill up, then switch the backup to be the primary and get a new backup drive.

[Retinend]

I dropped my 12TB HDD mains-powered Seagate drive before Christmas. From a tug on the cable it fell all of 10 cm to the floor. Then it wouldn't boot.

I took it to an expert on recovering data and he couldn't do a thing. He suggested sending it to The Netherlands to Seagate Headquarters because "something in the firmware is broken". He had never seen anything like it.

Luckily I had backed up the terabytes of data onto an identical drive 6 months earlier. I am proud of myself for my foresight because if I hadn't backed my shit up, I would have had suffered a real lack.

I am going to buy a HDD to replace the one I lost, but it's only because SSD is still too expensive to be an option at the 12TB mark. I don't think they even make 12TB SSDs?

Solid state drives are the future though. They are far more robust. And that really matters.

My biggest SSD is a very reliable, very safe "passport" drive that I can take around with me while I travel and can take whole high-definition video editing projects around with me, or play Steam games from it. 4TB is enough for such a secondary external drive.

One day, when SSDs at the 12TB mark (and hopefully ever higher!) are affordable I'd like to be rid of the whirring of hard disk drives forever because they are terrifyingly fragile.

[touchingcloth]

If old Moore was right, 12TB drives should cost the same as 4TB by 2026!!!!

[QDRPHNC]

@Retinend, I did exactly the same thing years ago, pulled on a cable and running hard drive fell from the coffee table onto the floor. Pre-cloud days and no backup, had to send it to one of those labs to be recovered, wildly expensive. 

[Mr_Simnock]

Never backed a sausage up ever and never lost owt. How does anyone fill up 12TB with anything meaningful? I've had 400GB for almost 10 years now and still not filled it up.

[QDRPHNC]

Can't say I've ever filled up a single 12TB drive, but I have hundreds of gigs of super hi-res medium format scans, 20 years worth of huge Photoshop files, etc. I have 500 gigs just of renders just to use in client presentations, it all adds up pretty fast.

[Retinend]

@Mr_Simnock I use the free program MakeMKV to make perfect replicas of my DVD collection, with everything intact - DVD commentaries and such. That costs me a few GB per disc.

High resolution holiday photos also take up a lot of space. I find it a shame to look at the small resolution photos I used to take purely out of consideration for disk drive space.

I recently got a HD video camera and so from holidays I usually come home with several GB of video in addition to photos.

I could crunch these files down to more reasonable sizes (using Handbrake for video, for example), but since I took the plunge and got the 12TB, I just enjoy the luxury of not having to.

edit: also, videogames these days "cost" a few GB per purchase via Steam download. Purchasing my first very big HDD was, in retrospect, indirectly responsible for making me a gamer again, after a long break

[Retinend]

@Retinend, I did exactly the same thing years ago, pulled on a cable and running hard drive fell from the coffee table onto the floor. Pre-cloud days and no backup, had to send it to one of those labs to be recovered, wildly expensive.

I was looking at a 500 euro bill, plus 300 euros for a replacement drive. It's crazy that I was willing to pay that. I was lucky that he wasn't successful, and that my backup was younger than I had first remembered.