The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/108er on 2024-10-07 03:14:55.
Today, I tried to access some old data from my hard drives that had been sitting in a cabinet for over five years, but none of them were detected. As soon as I plugged them into my computer’s USB ports, they just made loud clanking noises. One was a Western Digital drive, and the other was from Seagate. I had barely used them—essentially, all I did was store data on them, and now that I need them, they've failed.
I also tried accessing an old 700 MB CD using the CD drive from an old Optiplex, and surprisingly, I was still able to retrieve my old MP3 files and photos. These CDs are almost 20 years old! This made me think about saving data on CDs, but it’s not practical to store terabytes of data on hundreds of discs.
How are you all managing long-term data storage? I can’t believe how unreliable these external hard drives have become. One thing I've learned is that I'll never trust portable external drives for important data storage agai