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 do properly maintain an SSD not powered on frequently (alien.top)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I know SSD's are not meant for data backup, but I do have an external SSD drive that I only plug and use occasionally. I know from research that the data should still be fine at least a year, so I should plug it in no less than that. But... apart from plugging it in, do I need to do anything or will the controller just magically refresh everything? In that case: how long does it need to be powered for this to be completed? Some say you need to actually read through all data, or even re-write it all, however that would be possible on a system drive.

What gives? It's really hard finding some solid advice googling the matter.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

That depends on the controller firmware.

But if you want to be sure, just do a read-only badblocks test (if you use Linux). That'll force the controller to read all blocks and (hopefully) rewrite those it finds to be weak.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

It's mac actually, maybe should have mentioned that. Not sure what the best way here is to "read all blocks" of a drive. Maybe a dd command > /dev/null?