How to manage a swappable backup for failed disk?

Community Support
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I had a hard disk fail on my laptop a bit ago. It was surprisingly sudden. I opened up the laptop, say the power level, moved to another room and the screen was blank. And the disk was completely dead. I have had the old spinning disks fail and they complain before they fail. They start to have bad sectors and they gripe about things. I guess it makes sense that SSD does not do the same. It just dies. One moment, everything is fine. The next, nothing.

So, backups are more interesting to me nowadays…

It occurs to me that it would be really nice to not have to re-build me system. I was trying to use a boot thumbdrive and it had too old a system version. Everything worked but 0 wifi. So, no, nothing worked and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth involved.

I want to have another disk, the exact same size as the one that I am using, and put that one into an external enclosure. But I see fw does not sell one. Does anyone have recommendations or suggestions for this? Or is it just too obvious to talk about?

If SSDs fail in this way, I am surprised that I do not see more discussion of how to set up safe backups on duplicate drives that are externally connected. Do people just not do this very often?

  • ray
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Yeah, SSDs do tend to die very suddenly. From reports, that has happened since the beginning.

I learned to make backups long ago, the hard way – by losing weeks of irreplaceable work, because I’d been blithely certain that my hard drive wouldn’t die without warning, no matter what the reports from other people said. :roll_eyes: So now I keep backups religiously, updating them at least once a week.

I don’t attempt to keep a bootable copy of things, I just make copies of my Linux home directory and a few other files and directories. If/when something goes wrong, I still have to reinstall the OS and my software, but my backups ensure that I still have all of my data.

If I wanted a bootable backup to protect against SSD failure on my FW16, I’d go with a second SSD of an identical capacity and use RAID-1. With a FW13, I don’t think you have that capability (the FW16 only got it a couple weeks ago, with the expansion card that allows two extra SSDs), so I don’t have any experience in that area to help. :slightly_frowning_face: Sorry. Maybe someone else can suggest an alternative solution.