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this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
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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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I keep hearing people say that hard drives won’t last long...
Define long. Manufacturer R&D has shown that they can provide up to a 5 year warranty on some drives without the likelihood of excess RMA claims. During that period and beyond, for drives in consumer use, even for enterprise rated drives, there's too many variables of use.
...and to always have backups.
Mantra: Any storage device/media can fail at any time, for any reason, with or without notice.
But if it is like that, that means you would have to be buying drives consistently?
Yes. Without proper backups (i.e. at least two, ideally with one set offsite physical or cloud), you're at N-1=0
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?
Unless you're never planning to add to your collection, you'll always come to a point where you need more storage space. I have some 40-200GB IDE drives that are over a decade old and would likely pass SMART, but the question is what would I use them for? Even the files I consider important are over 300GB and easily fit on single drives, so why bother splitting them up to multiple drives, increasing the likelihood of failure of one or more?