Please see the screenshot. SMART says that the hard drive has read errors, write errors, load/unload retry errors. Is this serious enough to start a full backup at once?

Back your data up immediately. Especially the most critical.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

@baghu, ISTM that your SMART report is typical for your model and may not represent a real problem at all.

You could compare your results against others:

http://www.google.com/search?q=st1000lm ... eallocated

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Personally I think there is one single parameter that indicates if you need a full backup at once .. and it is nothing to do with SMART.
I call it :
"Do_I_Have_a_Full_Backup" if this is no, then you need a full backup immediately.

There are many ways to lose your DATA that are not related to things you see in SMART, we see them happening here all the time: cat pee on laptop, HDD dropped, lightning strike, accidental deletion.. etc etc

Your SMART data is perfectly fine. High numbers are good numbers, low numbers are bad. If you see that 252 reallocated sectors number start to drop, then you might have an issue.

That having been said, you should always backup. A perfectly healthy drive can be dead in 2 seconds due to a power surge.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

Thanks a bunch, everyone! All your answers have been very helpful! Thanks a lot!

By the way, fzabkar, your signature is superb.

All right, I'll backup the critical data.

Why is that newer hard drives are so prone to failures? I've had 5 HDD failures in the past year, all from various brands, but my old 40 GB, 20 GB HDDs still work perfectly if I power them up, even after being in service for >30,000 hrs.

Definitely, peeing cats are the reason why most of the people on this forum are still in business.

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• Remote RAID, NAS, SAN, VMware, DVR (CCTV), flash and tape recovery. Data recovery support.

Hahaha Lololol!