Old SATA drives turned into my best backup trick by accident

I was cleaning out a drawer last month and found three old 500GB SATA drives from builds I did back in 2018. Instead of tossing them, I threw them in a cheap USB dock and set up a simple rotation for my client files. Now every Friday I copy the week's work onto a different drive and stash it in my car or at my brother's place. It took one lightning strike near my shop in Austin to make me realize cloud backups alone weren't cutting it for me. The drives are slow and clunky, but they cost me nothing and hold everything I need on a bad day. I still use cloud for quick stuff, but this has become my go-to for peace of mind. Has anyone else done the same with old hardware they had lying around? What's your backup rotation look like?

1 comments

1 Comment

fiona_reed29d agoMost Upvoted

Well, I have to admit I'm a bit jealous of your setup. My version of this is three external drives that are so old I have to jiggle the USB cable just to get them to power on. Half the time I'm not sure if I'm backing up my files or just giving the drives a nice little electric massage. But you're right about the peace of mind part. I had a scare last year when my main computer just died one morning, and I realized my last good backup was from two months prior. Now I do the same thing, but my rotation is less organized. It's basically whichever drive I can find that isn't buried under a pile of tax paperwork. Keeps things exciting, if nothing else.