Now's a good time to buy a backup drive. Why not make a gift of it?

[robert blu]

More or less in the process to substitue my main HD with a new one I read this thread almost four years after it was started.
Yes, time flies and HDs can fail, we do not know when. Lynn is correct, it's always batter to have a redundant back up strategy!

 

[Rayt]

I have two external Western Digital HDD drives for Time Machine and a bunch of old SSD portable drives for processed TIFF files. I should get a third HDD drives for the Lr back up and TIFF because the SSD drives are quite old. I have been using the same Western Digital type drives for a long time but should find alternatives. They are relatively cheap though. Once I was taking one of the drives out of a drawer when the USB cable got caught on something and the drive slipped out of my feeble fingers onto the hard floor falling about 6 inches. It was enough to corrupt it. So now I have multiple drives. I am waiting for the day when cloud storage is affordable. The reason why 15 year old photos in my phone still exist is because I never had to worry about them.

 

[Archiver]

It's getting to the time for a mass migration to new drives, and now I'm using refurbished enterprise level drives from Seagate and Western Digital. 16TB holds a lot of photos and video! But I think that my overall output over the past 23 years is about 14TB, so I'll get a couple more drives, copy all data across, and use one as the working drive and the other as the synced backup. That will tide me over for another few years until drive prices come down and my data has gone up yet again.

 

[JeffS7444]

My current NAS is getting old, and I'm very tempted to make the jump to all-SSD storage with Beelink ME, currently selling for 304 USD which includes a single M.2 drive.

 

[Archiver]

My current NAS is getting old, and I'm very tempted to make the jump to all-SSD storage with Beelink ME, currently selling for 304 USD which includes a single M.2 drive.
View attachment 4879299

Interesting thread about SSD vs HDD longevity:

 

[JeffS7444]

Interesting thread about SSD vs HDD longevity:

Flash media isn't archival if you put it on a shelf and forget about it for extended periods of time, but that won't be the case here: I'd probably do a RAID-5 configuration of two or more striped data drives, plus a parity drive. And as yet another level of redundancy, an additional backup to external USB drive, which could be SSD or HD. While I don't keep my NAS powered up at all times, it typically sees use multiple times each week.