My father told me he wanted to make USB flash drives of all the scanned and digitized family photos and other assorted letters and mementos. He planned to distribute them to all family members hoping that at least one set would survive. When I explained that they ought to be recipes to new media every N number of years or risk deteriorating or becoming unreadable (like a floppy disk when you have no floppy drive), he was genuinely shocked. He lost interest in the project that he’d thought was so bullet proof.

  • st3ph3n
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    7 days ago

    I just replaced a drive today that has been running 24/7 for the last 5.18 years. It hadn’t failed yet but was in a predictive failure state due to the amount of bad sectors it has accumulated. 3 other disks in the same giant raid array are showing some bad sectors but not enough to be over the ‘replace me now’ threshold.