Data Hoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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How to fully format external HD without leaving it running for days? (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by reddstone1@alien.top to c/datahoarder@selfhosted.forum

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Weird problem but yeah, here goes:

I have a 4TB external HD (actually a regular HD on a USB dock but whatever, I guess) which I think has bad sectors. I'd like to complete a full format on it and use it as a secondary dump/backup/TV media drive. However, I have noticed I never have enough time to format it. I can't leave my computer running, stuck to a clunky USB device for what seems to be multiple days.

Is there any other way? Can I partition it and format it in partitions and then merge them for the same effect of bad sectors checked? If I ever quick format an HD, will whatever check disk done on it in the past canish and all bad sectors are in use again?

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[–] JohnStern42@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

Multiple days and using usb3? The drive is garbage, throw it out. It’s probably taking so long due to multiple bad sectors and crazy amounts of retrying. What does SMART say?