one for the techie's... external hard drives.

[MontyVeda]

hey up pedallers,

Is the data on an external hard drive more secure if the drive is switched off (for a long period of time) or on?

Logic (to me) suggests that left switched on for months or years on end, the motors will eventually wear out and render the drive more or less useless.

But, I've heard that not using (or powering) a HD for a long period of time can corrupt the data, rendering the drive more or less useless.

I know data will never be secure forever... just wondering what the best practice is... off until needed, or on until needed???

cheers

 

[swee'pea99]

I leave 'em running 24/7. Left my eldest's PC off while she was away for a term, and when she came back & turned it on, the HD promptly died. I don't think they 'rest' well.

 

[ColinJ]

Switch it off! The most likely cause of damage is the drive being knocked while it is operating.

If it is a backup drive then you are worried about the tiny chance of the backup failing as well as the thing you are backing up.

If it isn't a backup drive then you ought to back it up to something else anyway.

The main thing is to avoid hard knocks. I warned my niece about the risk of damage to the HDD in her laptop because she used to slam the lid shut and then toss the thing on the sofa while Windows was shutting down. She ignored my advice and carried on doing it. The HDD failed a couple of weeks later!

 

[MontyVeda]

 

[DWiggy]

What's the size of your backup, only have you thought about backing up to the cloud eg Dropbox, Google Drive etc much securer in my opinion.
They do multiple back ups and are very secure. No chance of loosing the external HD from theft, fire etc or hardware failure.

 

[MontyVeda]

About 3.25TB on three separate drives. I've already bought the 5TB drive to back it all up to and am wondering if it's best to leave it switched on or leave it switched off...current answer is 'yes'.

 

[User33236]

Best practice to secure your data is to use the 3-2-1 rule :-

3 copies on 2 different media formats with 1 offsite copy.

As for drives off or on I have heard of drives in storage storage being taken out and run up every few months.

Someone tried telling me it was due to the Earth's magnetic polarity! Trying to recall if that was on April 1st though!!

 

[swee'pea99]

current answer is 'yes'.

Or, to put it another way, 'no'.

 

[ColinJ]

With a 'maybe/it depends' chaser!

 

[mybike]

Best practice to secure your data is to use the 3-2-1 rule :-

3 copies on 2 different media formats with 1 offsite copy.

As for drives off or on I have heard of drives in storage storage being taken out and run up every few months.

Someone tried telling me it was due to the Earth's magnetic polarity! Trying to recall if that was on April 1st though!!

And I think that's good advice. If you have data that you aren't going to access, then switch off but periodically switch on and run Spinrite on them.

Spinrite is always worth running on a drive, it will refresh what is written on it and correct errors.

 

[swee'pea99]

Best practice to secure your data is to use the 3-2-1 rule :-

3 copies on 2 different media formats with 1 offsite copy

Me, I'd settle for 'make backups now & again'. The world is full of people who always meant to get round to it and ended up in tears. I've really got my act together after a recent scare and have installed something called SyncBackFree, which copies every change on the C: drive to a backup folder on the E: drive at 2.00am every night. Of course if the whole computer goes up in flames I'll be screwed, but I think that's unlikely to happen. My wife's new computer is a slimline jobby with no room for spare drives, so I'm planning to install the same software but have it backup to Dropbox.

 

[captain nemo1701]

I have all my stuff backed up externally. Just plug into the power, stick the USB lead in and any PC will recognise it as a large hard drive. I'm always using it, so tend to leave it on. If I don't want it on, I just pull out the USB cable prior to booting up the system.

 

[Over The Hill]

My computer is six years old, it has 791GB of the original 914 GB still free on it.
Am I doing something wrong? How do you use up so much space??

 

[User33236]

My computer is six years old, it has 791GB of the original 914 GB still free on it.
Am I doing something wrong? How do you use up so much space??

The first IBM compatible computer I bought came with a massive 420MB hard drive and I wondered what on earth I'd ever fill it with. Within a year I had ungraded to a 1GB drive.

Now x years on I have just shy of 14TB storage at home.

 

[fossyant]

The first IBM compatible computer I bought came with a massive 420MB hard drive and I wondered what on earth I'd ever fill it with. Within a year I had ungraded to a 1GB drive.

Now x years on I have just shy of 14TB storage at home.

420MB, that's massive. My first PC was a 486 with 100mb HD.