I would save individual projects on BD-R's as an extra measure just in case.

I disagree stwd4nder2. Copying files on a HDD that is defragged (or just has only been written and never rewritten) is twice as fast and smoother than on a drive that is often used to write and erase.

I have a sandbox drive, where I copy files to check them on the player, then erase etc. and after three years, it's now making ugly noises and is 33% fragmented. I need to defrag it, or copy the whole content to another drive and then copy back and defrag to cure it. Some large files like UHD just stop playing on it due to the fragmentation.

Stamper, what file system are you using

OSX Mac on both MacBookPro and a Hackintosh.

So for the first time over decades, the dreaded thing happened and a 5tb HDD with all my forum stuff on it went click click click.
That was right when I had finished porting all the files to it, and before I could duplicate the drive to another.
Lucky me it's a brand new drive still under warranty, I only used it like three times! So I called today the data rescue line from Seagate, and got a free UPS mailing sticker through the email, and will send the drive back.
I'm guessing it's just the head that got stuck (these 5tb Seagate have too many plates), so hopefully they will open the drive, realign the head, then copy the data on another HDD.
The Lacie/Seagate representative on the phone told me it should probably work 100% though some data may not be recovered (they have a 95% success rate). Hopefully it's just recent forum stuff I can still get.
What they do is they save the data (for free), and they send it to you in a generic drive of the same size, containing your saved data with an encrypted password to open it. In my case, it probably will be a Seagate portable HDD 4tb or 5tb.
They also send back a brand new replacement HDD of the same drive you sent them, so in effect, you get double the space back with the brand new HDD included.
If they succeed, I probably will only buy those from now on (though I read that you can buy the Rescue Service for any kind of drive from them, and it's about 10 bucks a year by drive). In this case though, they probably just send you back your data on the Seagate portable drive, and that's it.
Let's hope for a happy ending!

I've found Seagates to be in need of that kind of support because their hardware is unreliable.
Frankly, I don't care who they are, when I have a drive fail, if I can't restore any data from it myself and then wipe the drive, I open it up and destroy the platters.

Yeah, it voids the warranty, but whatever that costs is worth the privacy.

Do you resell old drive? I have seen videos where apparently, hackers buy on used sites older drives, and they try to restore any data that would be left on them (probably to resell stuff, like credit cards or others).
What I do is usually I copy on them four or five times some forum stuff, so that in essence, they recover parts of laserdiscs audio and other dumb stuff that is useless to them.
I once bought for like 5 bucks 4 WD yellow drives, one was failing, but the others were pristine. They contained like 8 years of a company stuff, not even wiped out!

(2023-01-20, 05:03 PM)Stamper Wrote: Do you resell old drive? I have seen videos where apparently, hackers buy on used sites older drives, and they try to restore any data that would be left on them (probably to resell stuff, like credit cards or others).
What I do is usually I copy on them four or five times some forum stuff, so that in essence, they recover parts of laserdiscs audio and other dumb stuff that is useless to them.
I once bought for like 5 bucks 4 WD yellow drives, one was failing, but the others were pristine. They contained like 8 years of a company stuff, not even wiped out!

Just use DBAN, that should make it near impossible for any data to be recovered.

Yeah, I usually double copy all the drives. But this one, I ported the data on, then finally ported the last few stuff, and kept it wired for 20mn, as I was prepping the other one to duplicate it. That's when it started clicking and died!
I'm considering getting Mega pro III or more, just for piece of mind.

Thanks, yes, I'm thinking of building a raid system, that might be more sensible in the future. Now the Mega solution, of buying 20tb of space a month, also can help preserving files. The main problem, as you probably have figured it, is that forum projects take up the most of all this data.