PSA: An Ounce of Prevention

Recently I ran some diagnostics on my external backup hard drives, and there are signs that they are starting to fail in their old age (they are about a decade old). You know what they say about an ounce of prevention, so before they crash, I decided to move my backup files onto some newer external hard drives with more storage capacity.

One of my new drives is a WD My Cloud drive. Its setup included plugging in a power source and connecting an ethernet cable between the drive and my router. There is no physical connection between my computer and the backup drive, so the data are streamed over my network connection. I am backing up 2.99 TB of data, and the estimated time to complete this task is currently "About a day":

I don't know how that compares to the data transfer rate of physical USB or FireWire connections, but the setup was pretty straightforward, I don't have to babysit the process, and incremental backups will take merely a fraction of the time.

In any case, I hope you are not only periodically backing up your data but also (1) using multiple backup devices, (2) storing them in multiple locations, and (3) periodically checking the integrity of your backup devices.