So I have a few 5TB external drives with all my media. I mainly just hook them up to my xbox and use kodi to play the files locally. I should probably be investing into a NAS or some sort of JBOD, but that's a whole other issue.
So no drive is backed up but they are all new (about 6 months old). Obviously, hdd drives can have mechanical failure, be a dud, or just plain suck. I do smart check and make sure the drive health is fine. I have been reading about bit rot and not sure if that is something I have to worry about and an immediate thing (or it's just some snake oil shit). I want to make sure the data stays readable and in best shape I can have it in for as long as possible. From the reading I have done surfin the web "refreshing" the data is usually done by rewriting the data. I guess what I am worried about is data corruption. With all this being on a HDD, mechanical failure is probably a bigger issue, and is something I should eventually get to with actual backups/parity. Drives are getting cheaper but I don't have the cash to drop right now on better/larger/enterprise (or NAS) drives to set all that up. I don't really want to re-download 20+ TB of stuff just to rewrite my data or shuffle data back and forth between my computer and the drive to rewrite. I could be going about this all wrong, so some pointer or input is helpful.
I use CrystalDiskInfo and HD Tune Pro to check drive health, but kinda just wanted to know if there are programs make help against data corruption, if it's even something that I should be immediately worried about, if I'm going about this in a dumb way, or if I should just start saving and work towards bulding a NAS, JBOD, ZFS or some shit. (if I'm honest all that shit seems out of my ballpark cause I like to just download and play, but it may be time to learn more about all that shit with regards to raid, parity, and having true backups)
tl;dr : I want to keep my shit for as long as possible on my HDDs. Back ups = good, but short of doing that, how to make sure data I currently have stays healthy on current drives?
I went the easy route and bought synology, set up a raid 6, and it saved me within 1 year.
Raid 6 spreads data wide enough to survive 2 concurrent drive failures. I had one drive fail enough to degrade the raid, and while I was awaiting a replacement (warrenty replacememt), a second drive started to fail. I bought a replacement for that, inserted it, then got the first replacement and inserted that. No losses, and I now have a drive in stock waiting for the next failure. It's been at least 5 years without failure, so I am due.
Schedule an integrity check once a quarter or month to protect against bit rot. The danger with bit rot is you won't know you have it until drives fail. If integrity is compromised, the shit hits the fan when you are syncing up the new drive, the system cannot recover, and you lose everything. That is when you start over with your verified backup. If that's bad, goodbye data.