I'm looking for a solution for storing backups on a 750GB drive that has had some reliability issues. I'll have backups elsewhere also, but this will be a convenient place to store backups on a more frequent basis. I know the dangers involved with what I'm asking, but this is also a bit of a learning experience.
What recommendations or solutions are there for storing data long term on a drive that might have issues? Something like a drive-wide PAR solution seems the most feasible and effective. An optimal solution would be windows based, but I have no problem install Ubuntu or something else on the drive.
Any help or advice you can give would be greatly appreciated!
Some unnecessary background information:
An older Seagate 750GB Drive I've had for a number of years has been giving me some slight issues lately. Several months ago Hard Disk Sentinel gave me some information that problems during disk spin up have been happening. I immediately backed up all the data from the drive. I recently bought a new 2TB to replace another drive, which will be replacing my Seagate. The drive has been functioning normally within the OS for several months. The only hint (other than Hard Disk Sentinel) that anything is wrong have been 20sec hangs when booting while it searches for SATA drives. This happens on 70% of boots.
The drive doesn't seem to be experiencing any bad sectors. This makes me think this whole exercise may be futile, as I'll boot one day and the drive just won't spin up. No amount of error checking can recover from that. I do have another older 500GB drive that IS experiencing an odd clicking noise that I might want to try something like this on also. Again that's likely an issue with the head and might just fail catastrophically one day.