Myth #18: backup on an external disk is the safest as it can be

Nothing can more wrong than assuming this.

HDDs fail !

This is since, and there is a good theory behind it. Each HDD producer has a MTBF – Mean time between failures.

Wikipedia says:

Mean time between failures (MTBF) is the predicted elapsed time between inherent failures of a system during operation.[1] MTBF can be calculated as the arithmetic mean (average) time between failures of a system. The MTBF is typically part of a model that assumes the failed system is immediately repaired (mean time to repair, or MTTR), as a part of a renewal process. This is in contrast to the mean time to failure (MTTF), which measures average time to failures with the modeling assumption that the failed system is not repaired (infinite repair time).

 

hdd-fail

 

 

 

 

 

 

The problem with HDDs is that they can’t usually be repaired. So, this is the Mean Time to Catastrophic Failure or Mean time to fail.

Do backups on more than 1 HDD because this is the only way to reliably make sure that your data is stored safely. If you can afford, cloud backup like Dropbox is a good solution as well.

Constant failure is the reason why we have RAID 0-6. The more disks you have, the better.

 

Why do people think that it is the safest way to store data on external drives?

There is some truth here. HDDs fail because of too many accesses, especially write accesses.

An external HDD (USB, SATA, eSATA) is not so often accesses as an internal drive, integrated in the computer.

All these and many more topics are in the free eBook "Improve your security" available here: www.improve-your-security.org.

About the Author

ImproveYourSecurity
Sorin Mustaca, (ISC)2 CSSLP, CompTIA Security+ and Project+, is working since 2000 in the IT Security industry and until 2014 for Avira as Product Manager, where he was responsible for the known products used by over 100 million users world-wide. Serving the security needs of so many different users made him think that there are other ways of to help the users: teachning them about security.

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