Bad idea to have back up hard drive in same tower?

My 1TB has almost reached it's capacity, so I am looking to add a 2 or 3TB internal drive. I built twin PC's (his and her's as we both shoot) so these are not Dell or Compaq towers.

My question is, I have several available bays for hard drives. What are the chances of both hard drives going bad about the same time? I'll probably wait several months to buy the 2nd drive just so one is newer / not from the same time period. The PC's are not connected to the internet and therefore only used for photo editing. The PC's are also unplugged from the electrical outlet when not used. Will it be safe to place the back up drive in the machine? I could get an external case, but the less clutter the better. We each also have an external drive at my parents just in case...

So long as you have the external at your parents as an extra backup, you are pretty safe. Two hard drives in the same computer should be safe enough from both drives failing at the same time, but there is always the possibility of somebody breaking in and stealing the computer, or (god forbid) a house fire which destroys it.

My main back up is an external, but is kept near my computer, however I do have another external with a complete backup kept at another location, which gets rotated regularly.

Standard "safe" practice is two backups, with one off-site, so you should be good to go. Of course, Murphy's Law can still come into play, so a 4th copy of your data, at a third location, is always worth considering.

ALL hard drives fail, the only question is when. You must have backups that are disconnected, ideally offsite. You have to plan for the worst case, which is say a power surge that takes out all electronics in the house, or a fire that burns everything.

A PSU failure can fry all electronics in the computer.

A fire or a thief can lose you any information stored at a single geographical location.

A virus can erase anything that is accessible with write access rights.

A bad file save can get duplicated to your mirror disks, unless you have a backup system with multiple file generations stored.

I work in IT, and deal with data redundancy on a daily basis. To give you an idea of how bad stuff can get fried, my house was struck by lightning. Anything that was plugged into an outlet was gone.
My expensive UPS absorbed some impact - but fried anyways, motherboard on pc was fried, etc. Was able to recover data off the hard drives. Since then, I've gone to a 3 step back up for all of my pictures but if I lost my pictures I would be pretty upset....

I have an external SATA connected hard drive where I do my initial dump from the camera. I've got every picture I've ever taken and saved going back to Dec 2005. This drive is then mirrored weekly to a NAS running RAID 1. That NAS is then backed up via Crashplan remotely. The first initial drive, the external sata, is only plugged when I'm dumping pictures to it, or doing the weekly mirroring. Otherwise its sitting in a fireproof safe.

I would do anything you can to prevent a single source of failure, but then add in a layered approach. If my house is sucked away by a hurricane, I've got the crashplan backup. If a thief steals my NAS, I've got the drive in my safe. If a drive fails in the NAS, ive got raid 1, etc...Just think, how hard would it be for you to replace the data on the drives and coordinate your backups around that.

2 copies on 2 drives in a single PC is better than 1 drive, but it is not better than 2 copies on 2 drives at 2 locations.

I have a backup disk inside my computer to protect from a failed hard drive or accidental delete, but I keep an external backup at my office in case of fire/flood, etc.

automag928 wrote in post #15953285
I work in IT, and deal with data redundancy on a daily basis. To give you an idea of how bad stuff can get fried, my house was struck by lightning. Anything that was plugged into an outlet was gone.
My expensive UPS absorbed some impact - but fried anyways, motherboard on pc was fried, etc. Was able to recover data off the hard drives. Since then, I've gone to a 3 step back up for all of my pictures but if I lost my pictures I would be pretty upset....

I have an external SATA connected hard drive where I do my initial dump from the camera. I've got every picture I've ever taken and saved going back to Dec 2005. This drive is then mirrored weekly to a NAS running RAID 1. That NAS is then backed up via Crashplan remotely. The first initial drive, the external sata, is only plugged when I'm dumping pictures to it, or doing the weekly mirroring. Otherwise its sitting in a fireproof safe.

I would do anything you can to prevent a single source of failure, but then add in a layered approach. If my house is sucked away by a hurricane, I've got the crashplan backup. If a thief steals my NAS, I've got the drive in my safe. If a drive fails in the NAS, ive got raid 1, etc...Just think, how hard would it be for you to replace the data on the drives and coordinate your backups around that.

Worst case,, you could loose up to a weeks worth of data?
I back up to Crashplan immediately and to two externals daily via Syncback. Plus still have my internal disk on the machine. Every second or third week, I take a mirror image of my machine using Acronis alternating to one or the other of the externals.

JJD.Photography wrote in post #15947500
My 1TB has almost reached it's capacity, so I am looking to add a 2 or 3TB internal drive. I built twin PC's (his and her's as we both shoot) so these are not Dell or Compaq towers.

My question is, I have several available bays for hard drives. What are the chances of both hard drives going bad about the same time? I'll probably wait several months to buy the 2nd drive just so one is newer / not from the same time period. The PC's are not connected to the internet and therefore only used for photo editing. The PC's are also unplugged from the electrical outlet when not used. Will it be safe to place the back up drive in the machine? I could get an external case, but the less clutter the better. We each also have an external drive at my parents just in case...

There is always a risk that both or more hard drives can fail at the same time unfortunately

The option is to try keep a backup of everything you take to minimise the lost to the precious data that you have on either hard drives