In this day and age, with the economy the way it is, it is best to retire well-used drives before they go belly up. Retire them and repurpose them into backup storage. All you need is the bare drive and $10.00 usb interface cable/kit. The kit will service both IDE and SATA drives. No need for expensive enclosures and boxes. Just the kit, share it among 20 drives!
And it’s ok to keep the drives just as they are. Put them in a baggie and pile them into a box. Use post it notes on each to remind you of the contents.
An added plus is you can easily format them to a blank file system and begin storing data immediately, not having to worry about getting software installed or mucking up your perfectly configured system.
I went through my pile of **bleep** and found 3 TB worth of old drives. That’s a good coupla hunnert bux! These can be used to store tertiary copies of important files. They are essentially free and since they are backup devices they won’t be experiencing day to day wear. That means their remaining 10% or 20% of life can be extended to many years, instead of burning out next month in day to day usage.
Folks, It’s a fantastic idea! And you get your backups! (which most people don’t have)
I would just caution NOT to use them as a primary backups of critical files-- You want fresh drives for those. Even just sitting on a shelf, a drive can become non-functional over time and you don’t want to risk anything vital on them. Store either primary backups of less-important files, or for a third (or greater) copy of files you absolutly don’t want to risk losing.
I would agree, the used drives are perfect for seconday and tertiary backups. Primary and mission critical backups should always reside on newer and tested hardware first and foremost. (You do test your restore capability don’t you?)
For those of us that don’t have any backups, or can’t afford anything, a primary copy stored on beater hardware is better than nothing. Do it on beater hard disks and CD/DVD.
It is also good that you mention that *any* hard disk (now or old) can go bad by just sitting around. I don’t know the precise reason why it happens, just that it does. And I have experienced it from time to time. Not often enough to investigate the reasons why. Any drive used for backup purposes should be powered up and run for a little while every now and then… Just enough to keep the lubricants and mechanics “free wheeling” - to use a term. By default this will happen if you update backups regularly.
But to put a disk and seal it in a box for 10 years, well, that’s inviting trouble. I recommend re-writing the data every couple of years.
For example I may be able to restore parts of my music collection from one of these- I can always download them again and they take too much space to backup all the time. If my main drives go down, I can restore as many as possible from these and only re-download a fraction of the library instead of the whole thing - this can save me days or weeks of work (downloading, originizing, etc.).
This past year I learned of a cool way to back up my large iTunes folder (and other large, ever-changing folders – and drives) using the Win7/DOS utility called ROBOCOPY in a batch file. I usually do it once a month and it takes a few minutes or less.
Do you or others want to know how? I can write it up if there is demand.
Since robocopy is a stand alone .exe program, I copied it off the Win 7 and put it on an XP computer, too.
For example I may be able to restore parts of my music collection from one of these- I can always download them again and they take too much space to backup all the time. If my main drives go down, I can restore as many as possible from these and only re-download a fraction of the library instead of the whole thing - this can save me days or weeks of work (downloading, originizing, etc.).
This past year I learned of a cool way to back up my large iTunes folder (and other large, ever-changing folders – and drives) using the Win7/DOS utility called ROBOCOPY in a batch file. I usually do it once a month and it takes a few minutes or less.
Do you or others want to know how? I can write it up if there is demand.
Since robocopy is a stand alone .exe program, I copied it off the Win 7 and put it on an XP computer, too.
I’d write it up anyway. You never know who might get inspired to start backing up their data. If people would accept this one fact, that they must backup their data on at least one other media, they wouldn’t go through so much torment when drives go down. Like the rest of you, I keep 3 and 4 copies of my critical data, and I use “old” drives to do it with.
