PeteCresswell wrote:

After one experience, I expanded that to several copies - with at least
one in a place where I cannot get to it the same day.

Reason: I had a USB controller go south on me once and it was frying
whatever drive got connected to it. Connected the 1st drive,
"poof"... "OK, bad drive".... connected the 2nd drive "Poof".... can't
recall if it dawned on me then or I managed to fry a third drive...

Anyhow, now I have a half-dozen backup drives and a couple of the are
offsite where I cannot get to them in the heat of the moment.

There are drives that actually have a USB interface on them? Haven't
seen or heard of one. I have seen and used USB-attached hard disks but
they have a SATA interface to connects to a USB-to-SATA protocol
converter PCB inside the external drive case. The bad USB controller
would only fry the USB-2-SATA converter inside the external case. Did
you remove the hard disk from the USB enclosure and try a new USB
enclosure?

Having more 2 copies, one on-site and one off-site, makes sense to
protect against fire, theft, or other damage or loss but I don't think
you really needed to make half a dozen copies on separate storage. The
hard disk inside the USB enclosure was probably working and just had to
be moved to another USB enclosure.

Personally, for the base or annual backup, I prefer removable media,
like optical discs. They are separate of the drive electronics and
mechanicals. If the drive goes bad, slide the disc into a new optical
drive. The hard disk is faster, yes, but requires USB3 to approach
internal drive speed on SATA3. With a new mobo, I'd probably see how
well a USB3 drive performed but I'm still using a mobo with only USB2 so
I go with an internal HDD for daily, weekly, and monthly backups and use
the optical drive for base or annual snapshots. The permanence of
closing the session on optical media prevents "accidental" deletes,
altering, or further encryption my backups: no writes, just reads.