On Tue, 23 Apr 2019 at 04:25, Andre Robatino <robatino@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
OK, but this drive is on a machine with 2 operating systems installed. Reinstalling and reconfiguring those takes just as much time before the drive fails as after, so replacing preemptively wastes time (until the drive starts experiencing regular problems, which it isn't yet).
If the drive is still working, tt should not be a big job to clone the disk to the replacement, so all you loose is the time
it takes to do the copy. If you have a space elsewhere, you can create an image of the disk now and restore it when
the replacement arrives. I use a USB device that provides slots for several types of drives. It is slow but lets me create
a cloned drive offline and then swap out the old one.
And I have at least 2 backups for all of the data, so I won't lose anything. If a drive starts experiencing regular problems, then I order a new one and replace it before it dies. So far this is an isolated problem. I had a drive once that acquired a bad sector, and nothing changed for another 1 or 2 years when it started adding new bad sectors regularly, then I replaced it while it was still usable. Another drive failed fairly suddenly with no warning after only 1.5 years and I lost some non-critical data, since I wasn't taking backups as seriously at the time. That won't happen again.
The point is, no matter how often I replace the drives, failures can happen. Without backups, those could result in data loss. With backups, I can avoid data loss if I know which files are affected, which Samuel's information makes possible. And if the drive holds one or more OSes (not just data) it takes time to reinstall and reconfigure and it's not worth it until a problem starts repeating.
At work (I'm retired now) I kept an image of a fresh install for each OS and applied updates so I always had a good
base system ready to go when a drive acted up. We did backups (full, series incrementals, and repeat) and the first
sign of trouble was usually a failure on the full backup.
George N. White III
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