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Comment by user3939382 | Hacker News Reader

What you should know is that I had an Apple OEM 1TB SSD in my late-2013 MBP and one day it failed so catastrophically under normal conditions that 2 of the best data recovery teams in the world told me there was nothing they could do.

Backup your stuff

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From my experience, SSDs tend to just disappear from the bus when they're done. If there's JTAG pins, maybe it's OEM recoverable, but good luck. At least with spinning disks, they usually have a media failure which often has warning signs. Bearing failures are usually seized at startup and there are ways to get them moving and then do a full dump. If the electronics fail, often you can pull a board from a working unit and attach it to the media and get good results. I don't think it's reasonable to swap flash chips onto another board (but maybe, I dunno?).

Get an 8TB backup drive (Costco has them really cheap), and run Macrium Reflect to clone your HDD onto the backup drive. Macrium Reflect makes use of Volume Shadow Copy, so you can continue using your computer while it's backing things up.

Those big backup HDDs use shingled storage, so they're not any good as general purpose hard drives, but they're excellent for strictly sequential writes, such as a full disk backup to a single file.

Pair that with an online/remote backup and you're all set. I like Backblaze because the software client is very good but you could just as well push your own encrypted backup to S3 or a VPS.

You can also use BackBlaze B2 to push your own backups with whatever software will support it, similarly to how you'd use S3.

I'll admit my memories of 2013 are hazy, but I do recall TRIM being an issue early in the Macbook's history†.

Backup your stuff! I happen to also back up to an SSD these days, because the difference between minutes and hours is hard to argue with.

†edit: history of shipping with an SSD standard, that is.

> because the difference between minutes and hours is hard to argue with.

If the backups are incremental it shouldn’t take hours.

Incremental backups are slightly higher risk.

For a given backup an SSD will be much faster, less susceptible to drop and vibration damage, and pocketable where a portable hard drive is pouchable at best.

Wow, you didn’t have a backup routine. That’s so basic. Why not?

Oh, what my routine is? Uh. I `cp -a ~ /mnt/backup/date` a couple of times a month.

... Testing backups?

Speaking about backing up...if one were interested in long term archiving, do magnetic platters offer longer lasting data integrity than SSDs in cold storage?

Not sure about that but I do know that the new sealed helium filled drives are much harder to take apart and do backup recovery on

>..do magnetic platters offer longer lasting data integrity than SSDs in cold storage?

Yes. With an SSD the enemy is electron leakage. Minute quantities of electrons trying to escape an unnatural state and return to equilibrium. (yes, I just anthropomorphized electrons.) Magnets however are more stable by nature. (yes there is nothing natural about hard-drive storage. SMR doubly so!)

Anecdote/anecdata: I have been able to retrieve full drives worth of data off of drives that have sat in a cardboard box for 10 years. I also have trouble accessing data on 1-year old USB flash drives.

In general I trust the older tech more than newer for long-term archiving. So that would mean HDD (the oldest tech thereof you can find still sold, probably) or tape or DVD over SSD.

But multiple copies in multiple formats cannot hurt, and the most important stuff should have multiple live copies.

it really depends on the format. pressed DVDs will outlast your VHS tapes

The JEDEC standard specifies client SSDs have to retain data powered off for a year under worst case temperature. Enterprise drives have a relaxed requirement for three months. This is because lower programming voltages are used to achieve higher total bytes written endurance.

Even hard disks should be powered on occasionally to test backups.

I've been coming around to the POV that "cold storage" is a bad idea and it's best to keep everything hot. It's been discussed on 2.5admins.com a lot.

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