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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Which part of external HDD will deteriorate? (alien.top)

submitted 1 year ago by Leonhardt90@alien.top to c/datahoarder@selfhosted.forum

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Let's say I have an external HDD with 4 TB of data, and I store it in the shelf.

There is no dust going into it, or anything.

I take it out from the shelf after 10 years, will it work perfectly in theory?
If not, what part can deteriorate and why?

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[–] Radioman96p71@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

A lot of it depends on the stability of the environment it's in. Not too hot, not too cold, not too humid, not too dry. You want minimal temperature change over time: a calm, steady, inoffensive environment where nothing changes and nothing moves.

Any deviance from that causes things to happen and things happening can cause the drive to not be in the state you left it in. In theory, the drive will be perfectly fine in an ideal environment like that. For greatest peace-of-mind you would want to store the data with some sort of error detection and correction and verify it every now and then.