SSD long term backups

K

KAC

Whatever
Think my SSDs are hitting their lifetime mark (more than 5+ years running 24/7). Been using them for a while now. I had a few platters that were showing yellows on the crystal disk or other disk health checkers. I decommissioned them all (4-5 disks).

Now was wondering what if my SSD fails. I will be completely SOL as I don’t have any cloud backups. How are you gays managing disk failure and fail safe w/ SSDs. Pretty concerned about long standing data going kaput because I didn’t do a cloud backup. What about NVMe drives?

Cheap solutions preferred. Almost tempted to order an SSD and keep a physical backup of critical docs/pics and then store it in the cupboard or some such. Heck even a 256 GB flash drive might just work.

What’s up?
 
Main thing I've always done with any important files was to just always have them stored in multiple places. Be it backing up copies on multiple hard drives, USB flash, or on secondary PCs.

But the more traditional method is having drive redundancy using a RAID. That way if a drive fails you always have a backup. I don't really have enough important files to need to do a RAID, but it seems to make the most sense if this is the concern.
 
I'm not sure why your question is specific to SSDs. Is there something in particular you're worried about with an SSD?

Whether it's an HDD or SSD, the strategies are all the same. Lots of backups in as many different places as possible. The more backups the better.

4TB drives seem to be the sweet spot for capacity vs. cost. They can be had for under $100. Buy a 4TB hard drive and dump everything to that. If you're extra cautious, buy a 2nd 4TB hard drive and back it up a second time and keep it at a friend's house in case of fire or other catastrophe.

If you can automate your backups, that makes it easier. Without getting too fancy, you can use something like FreeFileSync (Windows), or rsync (Linux) to do easy incremental backups.

There are also free cloud options that offer encryption. Something like sync.com can get you started with 5GB for free.

Has anyone here actually experienced hitting the write limit on an SSD? I remember early on with SSDs, that was the big fear. But I really haven't heard much about it. That might be just because prices have decreased fairly steadily over the years that it made sense to replace your 128GB SSD with a 256GB within a couple years and then go to 512 and 1TB. I have a bunch of smaller SSDs lying around that were working fine, but were just replaced with bigger drives.

I thought the deal was that when an SSD starts hitting the write limit, the data blocks would start to become unusable for writing, but still accessible for reading. So, I don't think you'd have a sudden failure where your data becomes inaccessible.
 
Thanks for the info. I will check this out on the weekend. I already have multiple 1 TB platters that I don’t want to continue to keep in my cupboard. Reason for SSD specific question is that it is relatively harder to recover from SSD failure compared to traditional HDD failure (to my limited understanding) plus I only have SSDs now so important to know if my backup approach needs to be different. I have 6 drives in my main computer with a space to add 1 more which I might end up doing just to ensure that bitches don’t get crazy and my data remains backed up in multiple redundant drives.
 
Network attached storage. Think dedicated file storage outside your pc
 
Important stuff like documents and pictures goes to Dropbox and OneDrive. I keep backups on my home server.

Stuff I can download again stays on my SSDs.
 
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