Data Hoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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How to preserve HDD longevity? (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I have a few HDDs that I intend to use for data backup. The projected use case is a full overwrite of contents every month or so, and I intend to read only in the event of data loss on my primary memory units.

I want these drives to last as long as possible, which is why I plan to only keep the drives connected when I want to write and evaluate health. In my mind, this prevents degradation while protecting from edge-case power surges and device theft. Is this strategy going to do anything to extend lifespan, or am I better off keeping the drives plugged in?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Really nothing you can do except be sensible. Don't move them while they're powered on, and keep them in a mild temperature and relative humidity environment comfortable for a human. That's about it.

Just have a backup. And a backup of your backup. That way you don't have to worry about it.