Backup Windows SSD options?

[professorman]

I just got my first SSD. I know SSD's have a limited lifetime.

Can I backup my SSD regularly (like how I backup my data) so that in the event of a drive failure, I can simply load up an image copy?

I used Norton Ghost 14 to clone my hard drive to my SSD and it worked wonderful, but I just want a backup option, because it takes about 3 weeks out of my life to re-install and reconfigure everything on my computer perfectly to my liking.


Does it reduce the life of the SSD to read the data to do the backup? Or is the lifetime of the SSD mainly related to the writing time done to it?

 

[corkyg]

Reading and copying data from the SSD does not shorten the lifespan. What I did was to put away the original drive I cloned the SSD from. That is my spare tire. You can reclone from the SSD back to that drive periodically. And, you can create a backup drive. None of those things will hurt your SSD.

What impacts SSD life is writes. And, that includes benchmarking. Too much of that is a bad. TRIM and garbage collection will keep your white space together. Examle, the Samsung SSD Magician has tools for that.

Another option would be to keep your data files on a separate drive.

 

[professorman]

Reading and copying data from the SSD does not shorten the lifespan.

What impacts SSD life is writes.

Thanks! That's the short answer that I was looking for. I can now set up a backup system to periodically backup my drive every month or so. I think Norton Ghost 14 can handle that.

Another option would be to keep your data files on a separate drive.

I do have my data on a separate spinning drive. This drive is split in 2 partitions, with one 80GB partition where my old windows installation was located (in case my SSD crashes) I can get back up using that. I should probably increase that partition to the same size as the SSD, so that in case I need to restore my windows to it, I can restore glitch free.