[guillem_lefait]

And then, after a year what do you do with the oldest hard drive ? Does it enter the cycle again, do you destruct it or do you use it in a failsafe environnement ? The procedure looks OK and I would like to make it more organised myself, just trying to find the right balance.

[marcusb]

The drive enters the cycle again. I use the drives until they show signs of failure (SMART monitoring/testing), or until I need to upgrade for capacity reasons.

I'm using "recertified" (really, used) drives that I've written about here: https://marcusb.org/posts/2024/03/used-hard-drives-from-tech.... They are inexpensive and, so far, have been very reliable. (And, yes, I've done restores from the backup sets.)

[guillem_lefait]

Thanks for the reference, it makes sense.