★ Odds of HARD DRIVE failure while kept in dry cabinet

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milkygirl

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Rethinking my backup strategy:

I currently have 600GB of photos, 300GB of videos, and approx. 30GB of data to backup yearly. I have a triple backup - 1 copy on desktop, 2 copies each on external 2.5" hard drives.

My question is: what are the odds of a mechanical hard drive failing, assuming i buy it brand new, fill it to the brim (say 1TB) and simply put it in my electronic dry cabinet for years to come.

I do have some cloud backup in place, but I am trying to avoid recurring costs, because the cost of a 1TB drive is probably cheaper than storing it on the cloud for 20 years+++, not to mention their pesky and ever-changing T&Cs which may result in deletions.

any suggestions on the best way forward?
 
Solution
USAFRet


Odds are somewhere between 0% and 100%.
You can't really put a number on an individual drive.

Will it still work after 10 years...20 years?
Maybe, is about as close to an estimate as you can get.

If, for instance, we were to say there is...
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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Rotate your backup drives.
1 local, 1 offsite.

Get the two drives with the same data.
Take 1 to work (or wherever)
Add stuff to the local backup (you are doing this more frequently than yearly, correct?)
At the appointed time period (weekly/monthly)
Bring the one home
Sync
Take the other one to work.
Repeat, Repeat.

This way, you have one offsite in case of fire/flood/theft. And you test the drive integrity.
If you just stuck it in a cabinet for 5 years...what would you do if it had died at 4 yrs, 6 months? You wouldn't know until it was too late.

Also, you get to upgrade your storage drives as time goes on.
In "20 years", will you still have a PC capable of connecting these drives to? Maybe, maybe not.
 
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Mr5oh

Mr5oh

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External hard drives aren't that expensive. I've been doing what USAFRet says for a long time now. Just slowly adding drives for redundancy.

My data is now spread across, the five PCs in my house, as well as disconnected external. I have three pelican cases:

1. External is at my house, in a gun safe.
2. Holds two externals, at my in laws
3. At my moms house

Then every so often, typically once a month or so, sometimes longer, I take a hard drive from my house and rotate it out. So the next one can be updated. All of these are a different color. Sometimes if I've had a bunch of changes, I'll temporarily swap out the whole case for a day.

I've had two externals die on me, both the same brand, but it's the reason I wouldn't have just one external as a backup anymore. Especially as cheap as they are.
 
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RolandJS

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One more thing to add: make absolutely sure that you really know, almost every day, where every off-site-stored HDD actually is - and still "is". I had one of my offsite HDDs either lost, stolen, "borrowed", or sunk somewhere awhile back. Even though the backups were MR7 and IfW3, the images were not passworded/encrypted. Upon realizing one was missing - I scrambled to change first my major email accts passwords, then financial passwords, am still changing lesser important passwords.

** I added the important phrase: offsite-stored! I was implying earlier, just decided to bluntly refer to those HDDs stored off-site. **
 
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milkygirl

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Actually the key question is not answered:
what are the odds of a mechanical hard drive failing, assuming i buy it brand new, fill it to the brim (say 1TB) and simply put it in my electronic dry cabinet for years to come.

Also, what do you use to test the drive integrity? I use HDDLife and SMART to test and it has never been accurate. Drives that show bad diagnostics continue to live on for at least a decade, and those that do not show any symptom at all can die the next day.
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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Odds are somewhere between 0% and 100%.
You can't really put a number on an individual drive.

Will it still work after 10 years...20 years?
Maybe, is about as close to an estimate as you can get.

If, for instance, we were to say there is a 75% chance that "a drive" would still work after 20 years. (just a random number I selected)
So what?
Out of 4 drives, 3 of them still work.

What does that mean for the specific drive you have in the cabinet? Absolutely nothing.
Your specific drive might have been the one that dies the very next time you turn it on.

If you were to store 1,000 drives, not all of them would work after being put on the shelf for 20 years.
Which one is your drive?

I've had drives die after 5 weeks, I have drives that still operate after 20 years.

And I've not read any 'tests' of a 1TB drive put on the shelf for 20 years and then see if it still works.
Why?
Because these drives have not been around for that long. You can only simulate so much.

One of the main longevity resources is reports by Backblaze.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-q1-2016/
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/170748-how-long-do-hard-drives-actually-live-for

But these are drives that are actually in use.
Something sitting on the shelf for that long? Lubrication dries out...

CD's...I have some computer CD's that are that old. Mid-late 90's.
Some work still, some don't.

I certainly would not trust any critical data to a procedure like that.
Backups, and move your data to new formats and drives every once in a while.
 
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mdd1963

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2 TB and below drives are pretty reasonably priced...

The old adage, 'one is none, two is one' should apply for VERY important data...

Most critical of your photos, backup on cloud...in 3 places.

Rest of your data, spread out on at least 2 or 3 drives....for the heck of it, burn it on multiple DVD's as well....

32 GB USB flash/thumb drives are pretty cheap these days, too....; as one of mine purchased in 2005 is still working fine, spreading your data out on these is likely survivable as well, just don't put all your faith in only one..or it will surely fail!
 
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milkygirl

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actually none of the answers so far have addressed my question. As what USAFret correctly pointed out, there aren't a lot of stats that show hard drive reliability, especially for use cases where it was written only ONCE and then put properly into storage/archival.

Separately, I was just wondering what is the most extreme way to further compress jpegs for easier storage (please don't mention mainstream options like 7Zip, WinRAR, gzip etc as it is worse off than players such as uharc).
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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1. jpg is already mostly compressed. You won't get much more. And drive space is cheap.

2. No one has taken a current 1TB HDD, written to it once, and stored it on the shelf for 20 years.
Simply because 1TB HDD's have not existed for 20 years for someone to actually do that.
Much less a bunch of them to work out some sort of "fail percentage", or "odds".

The first 1TB drive (Hitachi HGST) was released in 2007. Only 11 years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_hard_disk_drives

What you seek is unanswerable.
And flies in the face of tested and accepted backup and storage procedures.
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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Still working on the "20 year" concept...
1998, a typical drive size was maybe 20GB. I have a Sony laptop with a 10 or 20GB drive from that era.
The drive probably still works.
However...it was not "written once and then stored away"

I have a Dell laptop from 1997(?) with a 2GB drive. It still works. (or did the last time I cranked it up)
Older, I have a 130MB drive scavenged from a little 1995 Toshiba something. The drive still worked last year, after being unused for most of a decade.

I also have small drives of varying sizes (6GB and up) that did NOT work after a few years of unuse.

What does that have to do with the 1 or 2 drives you might buy for this experiment? Absolutely nothing.
You'd have to buy a tall stack of drives and sit on them for 20 years.

A standard concept in data storage is that a file that exists on one and only one drive, may be said to not exist at all.

Percentages mean absolutely nothing.
A 95% success rate is still fatal if your single drive is of that failing 5%.

If you were to do this with 5 or 10 drives, from different manufacturers and models, each with a full copy of that data, and store them away...I'd say your concept would almost certainly work.
At least one of them will survive. (Unless of course there is a fire/flood/theft/messy divorce)
 
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RolandJS

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"...actually none of the answers so far have addressed my question..." Absolutely true about my earlier post about knowing where your off-site HDs are! However, you only have to lose one or have one stolen or have one misplaced (and not found) to realize the importance of knowing where your off-site HDs are and if such are really there. I'm still drlling down through 300+ old old accounts and passwords :)
 
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milkygirl

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alright, thanks guys for the comments.

On a separate topic, can anyone recommend a pure USB-C powered (no need for AC adapter) hard drive dock for backup purposes? ideally with 2 slots for 2.5 and 3.5" drives, but 1 will do as well.
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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3.5" drive won't work off USB only.

Since you're going for the long haul with this drive, one of these, maybe:
https://www.amazon.com/USB3-1-Type-Rugged-Drive-Enclosure/dp/B075M987PD
 
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milkygirl

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USB-C, with PD, supports up to 100W. current AC/DC adapters are only around 24W for dual bay dock, so i don't understand why it can't be supported..

by the way, i was looking for a dock instead of an enclosure, since i'll buy at least 3 drives for backup purposes, and then into permanent storage thereafter.
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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Voltage, not watts.
3.5" drives require both 5v and 12v.
2.5" and SSD get by with 5v only.
 
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