There is no gui way of doing this afaik, I'd guess it involves doing some kind of dd > /dev/null
Make sense. I guess leaving it idle for some time should be part of the routine. Then again, there's a limit to how far one can go. If the routine ended up being "power up the drive and use it actively for 4 weeks at least" it would just become too much.
I wish there was just a simple feature to click and a progress bar showing that just did this without us having to try figuring things out.
That's really complex, so dd isn't really reading the whole thing regardless? Gosh!
Yeah, I should probably. An idea I had was to run a manual check of the latest time machine backup against the data partition. This is on a mac.
It's mac actually, maybe should have mentioned that. Not sure what the best way here is to "read all blocks" of a drive. Maybe a dd command > /dev/null?
I know SSD's are not meant for data backup, but I do have an external SSD drive that I only plug and use occasionally. I know from research that the data should still be fine at least a year, so I should plug it in no less than that. But... apart from plugging it in, do I need to do anything or will the controller just magically refresh everything? In that case: how long does it need to be powered for this to be completed? Some say you need to actually read through all data, or even re-write it all, however that would be possible on a system drive.
What gives? It's really hard finding some solid advice googling the matter.