Data Hoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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Has anyone ever had drives that lasted for decades? (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by ImHidingtheRealMe@alien.top to c/datahoarder@selfhosted.forum

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I keep hearing people say that hard drives won’t last long and to always have backups. But if it is like that, that means you would have to be buying drives consistently? Has anyone ever had a hard drive work for them successfully for a decade or even more where they wouldn’t have to be buying more?

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[–] zedkyuu@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

I have had a couple of drives die on me in the first year. And I have a few drives that are approaching 20 that are still working (though another one did die a year or two ago). You don’t know when a drive is going to die, only that nothing lasts forever, so that’s why to have backups.

These are all drives that were plugged in and constantly on. For drives in cold storage, I would be even more nervous about whether the drive would successfully power back on after years of being off.