As I sat down at my computer this morning I noticed a nightly back-up job window open with a failed status and the associated external Firewire 800 backup drives unmounted.
I cycled the firewire device off then back on and the drives seemed to mount but upon restarting the back-up a loud distinct “click-click-click-click…” could be heard from the external enclosure. For sure, a crashed hard drive!
A quick swap of my spare/bare hard drive into the enclosure and all was up and working within 20 minutes.
Yes, I keep a new “bare” internal hard drive as a spare for any that might fail among my backup devices. Just a little insurance so “Murphy” doesn’t have much of an opportunity to fail one of my primary drives while the backup is down. 
I’ll be ordering a new spare drive today…
