how to keep data on an old 1tb hdd safe ? (with little/no money)

[loadironmania]

i have an old 1 tb harddrive which was previously in my laptop that i put in an enclosure. it has 1-2 games on it and about 100gb of data that i care about.

 

How do i keep that data safe ? could i make a partition on the drive itself as a backup ? any suggestions?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Back up to a different drive or the cloud.

 

Backing up to the same drive doesn't really make sense cause once one part of the drive starts have issues it often goes downhill fast.

[adm0n]

Well the older hard drives get, the more likely it becomes that they brake. So if you don't want to save your data in any other place, you are spinning the dice.

 

If you have two copies of your data on the same drive, you could at least make it more likely that your data survives some corruption. But that wouldn't make it safe.

 

 

So you'll either have to get a different drive (small capacity SSDs are pretty cheap nowadays) or save to the cloud. You could just get multiple free cloud accounts and distribute the data over all of them. But that could get a bit annoying.

 

Just remember that just having two copies of your data also doesn't mean that it is safe. Data in the cloud can also get lost. The best practice is having:

• three copies of your data
• on two different types of media
• with one copy off site

[joshfrog]

If you make a copy to a 2nd drive you can get 1tb drives cheap, at least in australia you can.

If you do copy it to another drive give the drive to a friend or family member you trust and store it in a place that is safe and you wont forget.

 

If its stuff you care about try to avoid keeping it in the same house or place as the original.
If you do if something went wrong i.e house fire or something else it could destroy both copies.

 

If you have a good internet connection you could go to the cloud but i would encrypt the data 1st.

[gentlemanspot]

keep it in the freezer?  

 

... But the cloud is probs better 

[podkall]

1 hour ago, loadironmania said:

i have an old 1 tb harddrive which was previously in my laptop that i put in an enclosure. it has 1-2 games on it and about 100gb of data that i care about.

 

How do i keep that data safe ? could i make a partition on the drive itself as a backup ? any suggestions?

backup the 100gb of data you care about on something else

[jaslion]

Making a partition does nothing as its still o the same drive. A parition is purely software based.

 

The only way is to have a backup to another drive. At least 2 backups to 2 different forms of storage really.

 

Always do the 3 2 1 style.

 

Always have 3 copies, 2 on offline hardware with preferably one off site and one copy in the cloud