Comment by fbdab103
3 years ago
I had some immediate disgust thinking, "Moving parts? I am done with those!", but I think you are totally right. The 2.5" hard drive is likely to have better endurance in the poor environment and repeated thermal cycling of a car trunk.
Great idea. Hopefully I never have to try and read data from it.
Yep, an unpowered hard disk will be rated to something like 250 g's of shock and -40C to +70C temperatures. You could put it in a sealed pyrex container with some silica desiccant and some foam padding. Just keep it from sliding around loose, and it should physically survive anything but direct impact in a collision.
I’m not sure either would be great… An untested backup is a backup that may as well never have happened, make sure to test your backups!
This is very much a backup option of last resort. I maintain a real backup solution inside my house, but basically nowhere to keep something off-site. I do not consider the cloud acceptable. For my top tier priority data (low total file size), I really want something stored elsewhere.
Given the non-ideal state of the car, I think the plan would be to just replace that drive on an annual basis.
It's still very valuable to have a reasonably robust backup even if you skimp on maintenance, though. No one's going to smash your hard disk with a hammer to punish you for being lazy. 90% isn't much different than 99% in an exceptional circumstance.