Backup drive failing now what?

I just checked the drives on my desktop using CrystalDiskInfo and noticed that one of them (an external drive) appears to be failing.




This drive is used for backups for my laptop. It is a 6TB WD My Book external hard hard drive I bought in 2017. I just purchased a replacement for it.

Now I have to decide what to do about the data on the failing drive. To complicate things I used this drive to restore my laptop about 2 months ago. I can still access the drive OK. I want to save as much user data from it as possible.

1. Should I do a clean install Windows on the laptop?
2. Should I copy user data from the failing drive to the new drive that is important and not available elsewhere?
3. Should I then forget about any backups on the failing drive and start new backups on the new drive?
4. Should I discard the failing drive or can it be used in a less critical use such as temporary storage?

Get a new one.

Should I copy user data from the failing drive to the new drive that is important and not available elsewhere?

that is the first thing you should do.

MisterEd said:

I just checked the drives on my desktop using CrystalDiskInfo and noticed that one of them (an external drive) appears to be failing.

This drive is used for backups for my laptop. It is a 6TB WD My Book external hard hard drive I bought in 2017. I just purchased a replacement for it.

Now I have to decide what to do about the data on the failing drive. To complicate things I used this drive to restore my laptop about 2 months ago. I can still access the drive OK. I want to save as much user data from it as possible.

1. Should I do a clean install Windows on the laptop?
2. Should I copy user data from the failing drive to the new drive that is important and not available elsewhere?
3. Should I then forget about any backups on the failing drive and start new backups on the new drive?
4. Should I discard the failing drive or can it be used in a less critical use such as temporary storage?

1) Why would you do this if your laptop is running fine?

2) If there is data on the 'backup drive' that is NOT available elsewhere, then it is NOT a backup drive.

For my backup drive, it ONLY has (in my case) Macrium backup images (full, differential, incremental) on it. I could lose the backup drive and only lose those backups. I also have a second copy of key Macrium backups (full, differential) on a file server.

And yes, if there are files on your 'backup' drive that don't exist elsewhere, IMMEDIATELY copy them to a good drive.
Assuming you care if you lose them.

3) Yes, immediately restart backups on the new drive by doing a full backup.
Preferably something like a Macrium FULL backup.

4) Depends on how (un)reliable it has become. A drive that sometimes works, sometimes not, is more trouble that it is worth. Even for temporary usage.

Just my 2c.

Ghot said:

@MisterEd

Unhook the external drive immediately.
When the new one arrives, copy everything from the old drive to the new one.
Copy the most important stuff... first.

I forgot to mention in my original post that I am using Acronis True Image for backups. Since I don't know what is good or bad on the old drive I will start new backups on the new drive. For now I am not planning to depend upon anything in the ATI backups on the old drive. There is some data on the bad drive unrelated to backups that I will copy to the new drive.

The only reason I mentioned reinstalling everything on my laptop is because I don't know if everything that was restored a couple months ago from the failing drive was from free from corruption. Everything seems to work right now but that does not mean anything. For now I will just wait and see if I have any problems.

Ghot said:

Just run chkdsk /r on the laptop's Windows drive.

I will try that in a few hours. I'm backing up the laptop to the new drive now.