Old hard drives as backup

[Neostarwcc]

I have a number of old HD's lying around myself. Most of them are 250-500gb, nothing over a terabyte. They're simply too small for much use these days, so I just leave them sit with old files on them. Instead, I use several external hard drives for redundancy. I have two 8TB's and two 16TB's. At one time I was doing the same thing, using a docking system for data storage, but my data storage outgrew these old HD's. A 1-2tb HD seems tiny now. I had considered a NAS, but I don't want my files connected to a network.

I know right? Most video games (If you game) are over 100 GBs these days for one game and you have to download them all these days since CDs and Blurays are a thing of the past and no video game (or music) company wants to use them anymore. Luckily, I really like that internet is so much faster these days though to the point where it doesn't matter very much. I have a 500mb/s connection so I don't back up my video games to hard drives anymore when I can download a game in around 20 minutes. Or an exceptionally large game/file in like an hour. But even word documents and pictures these days are getting big compared to what they used to be too.

Its days like this that I wish I lived in Sweden. They have the fastest internet connections in the world that cost virtually nothing a month. Plus it would be nice to go to Dreamhack every year. If you don't know what that is, its a video game festival thats played over LAN (The largest in the world hundreds of thousands of people attend every year). Their internet speeds are just insane usually over 40 gbit/s. They usually host tournaments too and stuff with large prize pools. Someday before I die I'd like to attend. But, that's just a dream. I'd also like to go to Jerusalem to see King David's tomb in person (Have you ever seen his tomb? They definitely didn't cheap out on burying him for sure.) and a bunch of other things that Jerusalem has to offer. But, I'd probably never go lol.

 

[Freth]

Considering I only have a few of those 2 TB drives, I will have that same issue in a short time. Another reason why I'm purchasing a NAS is my CD collection, which consists of about three thousand CDs. I want to rip them to the server, for backup and playback purposes.



Makes sense if you have sensitive data. Just plug in an external drive, load the data and disconnect. Better safe than sorry.

I've backed up my CD's multiple times over the years. This last time I found my CD's were so old that many of them would not rip accurately or wouldn't rip at all. It's a good idea to back them up as soon as possible, because they do deteriorate over the years.

 

[Freth]

I know right? Most video games (If you game) are over 100 GBs these days for one game and you have to download them all these days since CDs and Blurays are a thing of the past and no video game (or music) company wants to use them anymore. Luckily, I really like that internet is so much faster these days though to the point where it doesn't matter very much. I have a 500mb/s connection so I don't back up my video games to hard drives anymore when I can download a game in around 20 minutes. Or an exceptionally large game/file in like an hour. But even word documents and pictures these days are getting big compared to what they used to be too.

Its days like this that I wish I lived in Sweden. They have the fastest internet connections in the world that cost virtually nothing a month. Plus it would be nice to go to Dreamhack every year. If you don't know what that is, its a video game festival thats played over LAN (The largest in the world hundreds of thousands of people attend every year). Their internet speeds are just insane usually over 40 gbit/s. They usually host tournaments too and stuff with large prize pools. Someday before I die I'd like to attend. But, that's just a dream. I'd also like to go to Jerusalem to see King David's tomb in person (Have you ever seen his tomb? They definitely didn't cheap out on burying him for sure.) and a bunch of other things that Jerusalem has to offer. But, I'd probably never go lol.

I'm not gaming any more. It was one of my many addictions that I couldn't allow any more. Most of the files I have I've been collecting since the BBS days. Various hobbies like photography, music production and the like. Also a repository of the software I've purchased and upgraded over the years.

Countries like Sweden have been into underground computer trends for a long time. Back in the mid-80's to early 90's, they had PC demo and music competitions, also computer art competitions.

Neat stuff.

 

[Sophrosyne]

I've backed up my CD's multiple times over the years. This last time I found my CD's were so old that many of them would not rip accurately or wouldn't rip at all. It's a good idea to back them up as soon as possible, because they do deteriorate over the years.

I've ripped most of my CDs and had issues with a few of them that I bought for next to nothing and I have a cheap resurfacing machine and use Exact Audio Copy to rip mine. EAC has ripped CDs with some "errors" that wouldn't play as audio CDs but when I played the ripped file I couldn't tell there was a problem with it.

 

[Sophrosyne]

I quit gaming when it all went to online portals as I had an unreliable slow internet connection and often I game alone (single player) and don't want to bother with logging into a server online to play a game every time. I play mostly strategy games often turn based so I can play a turn or so and swap back to my forums and research stuff online also.

 

[Freth]

I've ripped most of my CDs and had issues with a few of them that I bought for next to nothing and I have a cheap resurfacing machine and use Exact Audio Copy to rip mine. EAC has ripped CDs with some "errors" that wouldn't play as audio CDs but when I played the ripped file I couldn't tell there was a problem with it.

Same, I was just a stickler about it. I'm no audiophile, but I wanted perfect copies. lol

 

[Freth]

I quit gaming when it all went to online portals as I had an unreliable slow internet connection and often I game alone (single player) and don't want to bother with logging into a server online to play a game every time. I play mostly strategy games often turn based so I can play a turn or so and swap back to my forums and research stuff online also.

The whole being connected requirement bugs me too. I disconnected my cell phone when I retired, so I wasn't looking at it constantly.

 

[Sophrosyne]

Same, I was just a stickler about it. I'm no audiophile, but I wanted perfect copies. lol

I made the highest quality MP3 files for mine and they sound great on my stuff to me. You could use FLAC or some other codec that compresses them with little to no loss at all and save some space. My entire 8000+ song collection takes I think about 50 or so GB on my phone. I think I have about 500 CDs.
I would suggest that before you go hog wild ripping them to uncompressed format try ripping several songs into various formats and listen to them. I figure since I still have all the CDs I can always rerip them again to a future better format instead of spending money for 5-10 times the drive space to store them so I won't have to rip them again.

 

[Sophrosyne]

The whole being connected requirement bugs me too. I disconnected my cell phone when I retired, so I wasn't looking at it constantly.

I don't like it that much but these days you just about have to be connected somewhat. I have very few apps on my phone and chose apps that don't have any ads at all with them paying for a few of them. I don't look at my phone that often mainly to see what emails I've gotten and make sure phone calls are spam. I mostly use my phone for taking pictures and connecting my music collection to my bluetooth car stereo and bluetooth speakers at home in areas that I don't have a stereo system local to.

 

[Lost4words]

Last hard drive i backed up attacked me!!

My fault as i backed it up into a corner!

 

[Sophrosyne]

Last hard drive i backed up attacked me!!

My fault as i backed it up into a corner!

My hard drives backup light when out and it ran over an old CD drive.

 

[Joyous Song]

Problem being is that older hard drives have a bigger chance of failing. Dont put all your eggs in one basket i say.

I been using them for back up storage for years and they are still going.

 

[Sophrosyne]

I been using them for back up storage for years and they are still going.

best to have several backup sources in case one or two fail on you.

 

[Lost4words]

I been using them for back up storage for years and they are still going.

Until they die.

 

[Sophrosyne]

Until they die.

Or the interface to connect them to current equipment dies or is no longer supported. Sooner or later you have to upgrade your backup system to use current technology. A lot of people are backing up in the cloud but I'm not ever going to be one to back up anything personal there because anything that is located on an online server can be at risk for hacking and even destruction. I think my next backup system will likely be flash memory as it is cheap enough now and takes up little space.

 

[adrianmonk]

As I was going through a cabinet where I keep all my spare PC parts, I rediscovered some old hard drives. Over the years I've collected a number of SATA hard drives, some with capacities as small as 180 GB and some as large as 2 TB. What to do with them. I still get requests from friends, or friends of friends who want older PCs for older games, so I keep the 180 and 200 GB drives for that purpose only. But I think it's kind of a waste for the 2 TB hard drives to just be laying around, so I purchased an external hard drive docking station and some cases for internal HDs (see the image below). Usually all my backups are done internally, but what happens if the whole system gets fried...I'd be screwed. The docking station connects to USB 3.0 and has interfaces for SATA 2.5", 3.5" and IDE drives. Just push the HD into the slot, the PC recognizes it and I'm good to go. I use Directory Opus for all my file management and among the many tools it has is a backup utility. Besides dusting off perfectly good hard drives and putting them to use, I also get the peace of mind of having an external backup of important files. Win...win.

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If you have older drives, lookup your drive in the Backblaze drive reliability report before using it for any backups. I use my older 1 and 2TB drives as cold backups (snapshot for a specific date) and store it in offsite storage. You should also use a cloud backup service like Backblaze or to object storage like S3 on a nightly basis. You can use Cloudberry which supports S3, Azure, Backblaze etc.

I ended up getting an eSATA enclosure so I can snapshot my systems at full sata speed rather than USB3.

 

[adrianmonk]

Considering I only have a few of those 2 TB drives, I will have that same issue in a short time. Another reason why I'm purchasing a NAS is my CD collection, which consists of about three thousand CDs. I want to rip them to the server, for backup and playback purposes.



Makes sense if you have sensitive data. Just plug in an external drive, load the data and disconnect. Better safe than sorry.

Any specific brand for NAS ? I have used FreeNAS , though I have setup an Arch Linux server with 4 2TB drives in raidz10. Main desktops backup to Arch, Arch back's up to Wasabi (S3 compatible object storage).

 

[jacks]

This thread is giving me the will to toss my old 5.25 floppies. Who knows what is on that 360K of storage? Though I'm still not ready to give up the 3.5's. I have a USB floppy drive that still reads those.

 

[Sophrosyne]

This thread is giving me the will to toss my old 5.25 floppies. Who knows what is on that 360K of storage? Though I'm still not ready to give up the 3.5's. I have a USB floppy drive that still reads those.

I still have 3.5 inch floppies but I tossed most of them and use one the storage drawers for small 3.5" DVD-R now and they are not much more useful than floppies these days due to the storage size of about 1GB and too many people have USB sticks 8 times larger or more with many devices don't even have a dvd drive these days.

 

[adrianmonk]

This thread is giving me the will to toss my old 5.25 floppies. Who knows what is on that 360K of storage? Though I'm still not ready to give up the 3.5's. I have a USB floppy drive that still reads those.

You can image those. I have tons of my old floppies from games that I can mount and use.