Data Refresh for Long-Term Storage

How to refresh data held in long-term (non-powered) storage on hard drives, SSDs and other flash media. Video covers relying on cold storage practicalities, verifying data migration and on-drive copies, specialist refresh software (including DiskFresh), and Linux terminal commands for hard drive and SSD data refresh. This video is a follow-up to my episode on “Long-Term Data Storage”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulh9z-JluBs And you may also want to learn more about SMR hard drives in my video “Explaining Hard Drive Technologies”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12z-wWu1BaM Software covered in this video can be obtained as follows: DiskFresh: https://www.puransoftware.com/DiskFresh.html TeraCopy: https://www.codesector.com/teracopy SpinRite: https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm Hard Disk Sentinel: https://www.hdsentinel.com/ LINUX TERMINAL COMMANDS: NB: do not type the square brackets -- they indicate where you own data goes! To use BadBlocks to perform a non-destructive read/write test to refresh the data on a hard drive: sudo badblocks -f -b 4096 -p 1 -nsv /dev/[drive or partition] To use Grep to refresh the data on an SSD or other flash media by searching every file on a drive or in any folder or tree thereof (and hence causing every byte of data to be read): grep -r [search term] /[LOCATION] All of my storage videos can be found here: https://explainingcomputers.com/storage_videos.html More videos on computing and related topics can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/@ExplainingComputers And more videos on film and other making, plus retro tech, can be found on my Christopher Barnatt channel: http://www.youtube.com/@ChristopherBarnatt Chapters: 00:00 Titles, Introduction & background 03:11 Cold Storage Practicalities (data migration and on-drive copy/verify) 07:22 Specialist Applications 14:37 Operating System Utilities 19:31 Refreshing SMR Hard Drives 21:42 Wrap #DataRefresh #DiskFresh #TeraCopy #HardDiskSentinel #SpinRite #Windows #Linux #SMR #BadBlocks #grep #ExplainingComputers