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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[–] dr100@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I have a 200MB Seagate coming from the 90s that still works fine and it was untouched from 2001 to 2019. Yes, I had to buy MANY, MANY, MANY drives in the meantime, even if that drive didn't die.

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

When I started my first serious networking job, there was a syslog server in our datacentre that had been running nonstop for almost a decade. It was an ancient radiator-white supemicro 3u server with 6 SCSI disks. I decommissioned that server 7 years later. Those SCSI disks had been running nonstop for 16+ years without a single problem. The inside of the server was covered in black plastic dust from the slowly disintegrating case fans. Other than half the case fans not working, there was nothing wrong with that server.