Would you? Is it safe?
I mean, because of all the magnetics and all?
Thanks
Q
I do it.
There’s nothing to worry about.
The real issue here is that hard drives that sit too long powered off might not spin up again. The bearings or head motor might stiffen up from sitting around. Hard drive manufacturers are more interested in keeping them working while they are running and arent so worried about using them as long term offline storage.
What you should be doing is keeping one drive running live and another stored as an archive. The chances of losing both is much lower than losing one.
No problem. I do it all the time. In fact, I am considering having a running USB or Ethernet drive permanently kept in a safe. All I need is to drill a hole on the side for the cable. I would have to check the power dissipation but I think it would be ok. That way I could keep all data on that drive, encrypted, and if a computer was stolen no data would be compromised or lost.
I’ve been rotating two external USB hard drives between home and my safe-deposit box for several years now. No problems.
If it’s long-term (more than a week or two), why not just keep backups burned to DVD in the box? No worries about moving parts freezing up, or stray magnetic fields, or even a random dousing with water.
DVDs only store about 4 gigs of data. 250 gig USB hard drives are really cheap about $60. Much faster and easier to use.
I don’t think so. How much static load do you think is on a drive bearing? This is a non-issue.
Could a safe deposit box be expected to have a strong magnetic field?
I used to do this, and didn’t have any problems either. These days, I’m using a couple thumb drives instead. I used 2.5 inch laptop drives - note that a 3.5 drive in a USB enclosure may not fit in smaller safe deposit boxes. CDs don’t. The dimensions quoted by the bank are for the actual vault space. The tin box that goes inside is smaller.
The bearings themselves of course aren’t the issue, the lube on them is. It can shift around and the surface dry out. What I’d do is flip the drive over every once in a long while. (The motion and vibration of use reduces this problem.) Electrolytic caps can go bad when not used for a good long while, but I don’t think I’ve seen a HD that had an electrolytic in … probably never? The electronics are going to be stable for a good long time. (The plastic conductor-coated ribbon cables can dry out and crack but the time scale for that is too long to worry about.)
What you really need to worry about is Boris Badenov leasing the box next to yours, installing a powerful degaussing system in it and wiping the drive clean in the middle of the night.
Hey Xema,
I was thinking of all the magnetics which hold the vault closed. Admittedly, I never even gave it a thought till I brought it up to my son… :rolleyes:
Q
Googling suggests that bank vault doors are largely mechanical devices. They often include a time lock which could involve some electronics, but there seems to be little indication that magnets strong enough to affect a hard disk (even one quite near) are typically employed.
I hope I can expel these Cheez-It crackers out of my lungs after the lafter, ftg!!!:D:D:D
In my teens, I used to have dreams about Natasha crawling into bed with me, saying “Borrris isss so leeetle and YOU are so beeeg! Tell me about your Stealth Bomber, my Darlink?”
Thanks for the smile and the memory,** ftg**!
Q
Ask the bank. They probably offer some way to indemnify you against loss of stuff, if nothing else.
RNATB and Xema:
“Occam’s Razor”, right?
The simplest solution is usually the right one? 
If I had given it a little more thought, there’s a 15% chance I may have come up with that “ask the bank” question myself!:smack:
Then again, that’s why there’s this place!
Thanks!
Quasi
About six months ago I remember hearing a Mac Geek Gab podcast where they discussed this, and they went into a deep discussion of concerns with the stopped platters allowing magnetic domains to be affected more by the earth’s magnetic field.
But I can’t find a mention of this hypothesis in Google (though Google finds this thread quite well :)).
They recommended spinning up the drive once every six months. That would hopefully address the problems that HorseloverFat raised.
In the world of mechanical wristwatches, folks often by motorized watch winders, not only to keep from having to reset the date on the watch that is not in use, but so that the mechanisms keep moving and the lubricants are well distributed.
Since hard drives are equally delicate, I imagine this principle holds true for them.
A perfect example of why one shouldn’t assume that “Die Hard” is the way the world really is.
Though I’ve never seen such, a bank might possibly offer some guarantee that the items you leave in your SD box will be there when next you visit. But it’s hard to imagine they would give any sort of guarantee that data would be recoverable - there are far too many ways for this to go wrong (e.g. customer unwittingly failed to properly save his data on the removable device).
No modern hard drive has anything like the mechanical complexity of a wind-up watch. Hard drives are actually quite simple devices (mechanically) with just a few moving parts - they would not deliver their astonishing reliability otherwise.