Constant rewriting of hard drive - effect on life expectancy?

[Kaido]

I had the thought of a really secure backup system for laptops...have the laptop with its internal hard drive along with two external 2.5" hard drives of the same size as the laptop's internal. Each night, do a full clone from the internal drive to the external drive. The next night, use the other external drive, and alternate from there. My question is, would this kill the drives a lot faster? It takes about an hour or so to fully clone a disk drive, which would be fine when you're closing up for the night.

 

[imported_Tick]

It shouldn't make much difference, but any manufacturing defects will manifest faster. Why not just set it to update only the files that you changed?

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: Tick
It shouldn't make much difference, but any manufacturing defects will manifest faster. Why not just set it to update only the files that you changed?

That's probably a better idea. I know that Norton Ghost lets you clone drives, which is great for upgrading. For my Mac stuff, I use Carbon Copy Cloner, which lets you clone the drive or make a disk image to another drive. The advantage of doing a clone is that if the hard drive dies or your system gets eaten by a virus, you can have the whole thing back in a snap, complete with applications, settings, and drivers, rather than just the file backup.