Lucky me, I recently acquired two 4TB hard drives, and I’m making a point to use one as my active backup, and every few months or so, clone that drive to the other one and swap them, just in case one ever fails ya know…
Doesn’t swapping increase the chance of total failure?
You’re basically using them equally, which makes it more likely that the surviving hard drive failes while copy the data to the future brand new replacement drive.
(This is obviously assuming, that storing a drive is different to you using the drive and that both drives will fail around the same time)
Meh, anything can happen at any time, I’ve come to accept that.
These are basically brand new surveillance grade hard drives, which means they’re designed to run 24/7 and run cooler than consumer grade drives. Neither one has any bad sectors, and they both purr quieter than kittens.
I always keep one completely offline and totally disconnected, sitting on a shelf, save for the occasional clone day where I have both connected.
I figure the chances of both failing at once are on an astronomical scale.
RAID isn’t a backup. It only protects against one mode of data loss, disk failure, which is probably the one the average user should be least worried about.
My CPU crapped out. And the wire leading to the thing that goes ‘beep’ when you turn on cpu was broken.
In trying to diagnose the CPU issue, I had to turn computer on and off a lot.
Somehow, doing that on and off repeatedly corrupted the hard drives. So raid doesn’t protect against problems like that or power spikes that fry things.
Its a little cylinder with 2 wires leading to the mobo. Not for error codes but for the ‘beep’ that happe is when you turn on computer. Is that not a thing any more?
Nope. At least, not that I’ve seen even slightly recently. I got into PCs ~15 years ago, and they were already becoming a lot less common then. It probably still exists in some niche way, that’s usually how it goes. Maybe HP still uses them or something like that.
Sorry if any of this is stuff you already know: The beep is a POST code- power on self test. That beep when you turn on the computer is basically the computer saying, “everything started correctly, from here on it’s probably a software problem.”
If there is a problem and your motherboard can figure out what it is- bad cpu, bad ram, no video, etc- it gives a POST code via the little speaker. It’s a nice troubleshooting tool, because a lot of the time the hardest part of the fix is figuring out what part is the problem.
Redundant network storage is cheap and available. If you’re a little tech savvy, one of those and a cheap hosting plan accomplishes two copies local, and one remote.
Lucky me, I recently acquired two 4TB hard drives, and I’m making a point to use one as my active backup, and every few months or so, clone that drive to the other one and swap them, just in case one ever fails ya know…
Doesn’t swapping increase the chance of total failure?
You’re basically using them equally, which makes it more likely that the surviving hard drive failes while copy the data to the future brand new replacement drive.
(This is obviously assuming, that storing a drive is different to you using the drive and that both drives will fail around the same time)
Meh, anything can happen at any time, I’ve come to accept that.
These are basically brand new surveillance grade hard drives, which means they’re designed to run 24/7 and run cooler than consumer grade drives. Neither one has any bad sectors, and they both purr quieter than kittens.
I always keep one completely offline and totally disconnected, sitting on a shelf, save for the occasional clone day where I have both connected.
I figure the chances of both failing at once are on an astronomical scale.
Why not just use a RAID?
RAID isn’t a backup. It only protects against one mode of data loss, disk failure, which is probably the one the average user should be least worried about.
My CPU crapped out. And the wire leading to the thing that goes ‘beep’ when you turn on cpu was broken.
In trying to diagnose the CPU issue, I had to turn computer on and off a lot. Somehow, doing that on and off repeatedly corrupted the hard drives. So raid doesn’t protect against problems like that or power spikes that fry things.
I haven’t seen a PC that would actually have audible post codes in a very long time. Nowadays it’s usually LEDs, or a very simple little display.
Its a little cylinder with 2 wires leading to the mobo. Not for error codes but for the ‘beep’ that happe is when you turn on computer. Is that not a thing any more?
Nope. At least, not that I’ve seen even slightly recently. I got into PCs ~15 years ago, and they were already becoming a lot less common then. It probably still exists in some niche way, that’s usually how it goes. Maybe HP still uses them or something like that.
Sorry if any of this is stuff you already know: The beep is a POST code- power on self test. That beep when you turn on the computer is basically the computer saying, “everything started correctly, from here on it’s probably a software problem.”
If there is a problem and your motherboard can figure out what it is- bad cpu, bad ram, no video, etc- it gives a POST code via the little speaker. It’s a nice troubleshooting tool, because a lot of the time the hardest part of the fix is figuring out what part is the problem.
Redundant network storage is cheap and available. If you’re a little tech savvy, one of those and a cheap hosting plan accomplishes two copies local, and one remote.
I’m using a laptop with external USB adapters.
Check my comment history though, my very last comment to another post made a silly reference to RAID…