On 26/11/23 08:02, Steve Litt wrote:
Is the remote vendor going to take the same care in preserving your data as you would? You could buy two 2TB spinning rust external hard drives for seventy bucks each, so if one gets borked you have the other. If you desire offsite, keep one in a bank safe deposit box high off the ground to prevent water damage.
As a matter of habit I've kept every hard disk I've ever used since the 1990s. Going back to one after it has been in storage for 5 years has a high probability it won't work. They either won't fire up at all or there will be major problems with the data.
As a matter of policy I suggest that you keep moving and aggregating the contents of old drives to the obviously much larger new drives every couple of years.
Incidentally, to save me the bother of writing it, is there a program that can scan drives and extract and classify unique copies of 'useful' files such as photos and emails - probably keeping their MD5 and metatdata and in a SQL database - maybe even the binary file blob as well.