Longer lasting I think; leave it powered on and warm.
Best in reality; buy 3 drives, and after you do a backup move one off site.
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this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
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100% this. If we're talking about a mechanical drive, you want to minimize the state changes it goes through. So leaving it powered on all the time and spinning is the best. There's data centers with old computers that engineers are afraid to turn off cuz they're not sure they'll turn back on.
I don't think unmounting in itself does any difference to it's longeviy. I think what you want is powering it down.
Mounting or unmounting a filesystem won't make a difference for drive longevity.
If you want to keep your backups secure, you want to keep them offline, so if you get ransomware it doesn't encrypt your backup too. (Or if you just mistype a command and target the wrong device, folder, etc.)
But drive motor starts and stops are when the most failures occur. So the ultimate question isn't how to make a drive last longer, it's how you plan to handle it when the failure inevitably occurs.
I recently bought a second external drive to do a backup of the first one. In the process I'm going to switch to btrfs. It can do data scrubbing which allows for self repair of corrupted data, which can occur if you leave a drive unpowered in a closet for some years.
Hmm. I unmount mine to reduce noise. Didn't think about endurance though, curious to see opinions too.