I thought I'll get another next week when I've got more time...

It's not a massive problem if your backup fails because you still have the originals; but of course then you have no backup. My problem was that the first drive had loads of music on it. No problem, just temporarily point iTunes at the backup until I get another drive for the music...

Now I'm winging it a bit having backup and music on the same drive and gambling on this new one not failing in it's first few months.

Google have done loads of research on hard drives - basically they all fail at some point and no brand is better or worse than another. I seem to remember they did find that hard drives that were kept busy survived longer than those that weren't so busy - presumably because the effort of spinning up/down puts extra wear on them

Posted By: BerlinCanary, Nov 27, 17:14:20