- Joined
- Jan 20, 2012
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- Your Mac's Specs
- Air M2 ('22) OS 14.3; M3 iMac ('23) OS 14.3; iPad Pro; iPhone 14
I don't generally use highly valuable files, I edit video from my Sony camera to create Grandparent flash drives of my son, etc. I always have a back-up of that on the original SDHC cards. Nothing else I do is important to my work that I don't already have a back-up of.
If my hard drive failed now its off to Apple for warranty repair. How often, if ever, has that occurred for you guys ,btw?
Well, concerning your questions above (put in bold) - if the internal HD fails, the device would likely not be 'repaired' but replaced - any data on the 'dead drive' might be retrieved at a cost, especially if using a professional service, SO a reliable backup(s) is still a strong recommendation particularly since these current external drives are so cheap.
As to your second question which I assume is asking if others have had HDs die? Below is a graph that I've posted before about expected life expectancy over time of HDs (from a company that does PLENTY of backup storage for others) - notice that there is a 20% failure rate at 4 yrs, and a 'projected' 50% rate at 6 years - I usually replace my computers at 4-5 years for a variety of reasons, and HD failure is certainly a consideration for me.
NOW, my first computer was an Apple II+ w/o a HD - then my place of employment switched to PCs which I was on for 30+ years, both at work and at home, so I've owned dozens of PCs w/ HDs, both desktop & laptop models - I've had 3 HD failures, 2 were Maxtor (made by Seagate, I believe - which BTW performed the poorest in the Backblaze tests) external HDs and 1 was on a IBM ThinkPad laptop (believe my cleaning service knocked it off the table - I upped the RAM and added a new internal HD, put on Linux which I enjoyed 'playing with' for a couple of years). Wife and I are now using an iMac and MBPro, both now approaching 3 years of age and working fine, and both w/ redundant backups. Dave
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