Best practice/OSX software for managing Hard Drive archives

You do not want to use solely techniques/tools such as Disk Utility, SMART, etc. as they do not actually verify the integrity of the data.

For validation of archives, you'll want to store not only the data to the drive but also checksums of each part of the data. Periodically you'll then want to read in all the data from the drive, recalculate the checksum and check that it matches.

This is necessary because modern hard drives can often fail in a mode where everything seems to be working, but as soon as you try to read specific part of the hard drive - they fail. There's a large risk that you won't get an advance alert from SMART or programs like Disk Utility that check only the file system structure.

To generate and validate the checksums you can use software such as "Checksum Folders":

http://www.nordcode.eu/checksum-folders/

You can also create your own solution by using commands in the Terminal. Open up the Terminal and issue the following:

 find /Volumes/MyDisk -type f -not -name “checksums.txt” -exec md5 ‘{}’ \; > /Volumes/MyDisk/checksums.txt

where "MyDisk" should be replaced with the name of your disk.

This generates a text file with the checksums of every file on the disk. Then to later validate the checksum, you run the same command, but redirect the output to "checksums2.txt".

Then run:

diff /Volumes/MyDisk/checksums.txt /Volumes/MyDisk/checksums2.txt

if you have any output from that command, it means that the checksums do not match.