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

I have had many individual drives last decades at work and at home the problem is that the odds for failure are the same for each individual drive but if you have more drives the odds that YOU will see a failure increase.

It is like saying what are the odds or rolling a 1 on a 6 sided die

https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1654073/probabilities-for-rolling-multiple-dice-and-getting-one-number-or-greater

1 16.67% 4 38.58%

So think of it like having a PC with one drive, vs having a NAS which typically has 4 drives. The more drives you have the more likely it is that you will see at least one failure during the life of the drive.