Question: Hello Everyone,
don’t really need to get into many specs for this question.
I have a pc thats set up as the homes media center using plex.
I am a paranoid lunatic and the last thing i want to do is have to spend huge amounts of time redoing anything so as i fill up a hard drive with data I have another drive attached doing an exact copy and one its full that extra drive is removed and placed in storage.
so theoretically if any drive fails I have a backup that can quickly be copied to a new drive.
here’s my issue the other day I was reading researching something else and I can not remember what but there was a mention that hard drives that just sit while they don’t go bad the data starts to fail after (i think it said 5 years) and should be erased and rewritten every so often.
thats my qustion, how often should this be done or if its even needed, I’ve never heard of it before and never experienced this issue that i know of (at least not on hard drives, burned optical discs yes) and some of my hard drives are going on 10 years old but think the majority of them are 5 years or newer.
all these hard drives are just standard hard drives, i might have an hybrid but we’ll just assume they are all just the old mechanical drives, know some are 7200rpm but seems more of the newer ones are 5400rpm’s but much larger in size
thanks
ryan
Answer:I think I see you are making backups pretty close together, weekly perhaps?, you are doing a great job! I stored HDDs a few years myself without any problem restoring from them. To me, the weakest link is during the backup or restore (when Murphy’s Law can kick in) or accidentally dropping or bumping a backup drive.