Quote:
Originally Posted by haertig
I'm already starting to rethink my idea stated a few posts back of keeping my "write once" stuff copied to thumbdrives stored in a Safe Deposit Box. Maybe that idea should be updated to store that data on an HDD rather than flash memory.
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Both SSDs and HDDs have their own problems. Yes, bits can go bad in SSDs, but HDDs have moving parts, which can cause you to lose the whole thing. I just finished running backups, and when trying to generate a checksum of an HDD image I just wrote, I got an I/O error, suggesting the backup HDD that I bought less than a year ago has already failed. Now I need to replace it and image my system again.
There's always a risk that a backup HDD won't spin up after it's been sitting for a long time. I have another backup HDD that throws tons of errors if I try to use it, even though it technically still (mostly) spins up. For off-site storage I would probably prefer optical media, of which the M-disc is the most reliable, since the data is etched into a carbon layer that doesn't degrade the way the dye in normal CD/DVD/BD-R sometimes does, but even that isn't foolproof, since the glue that holds the plastic and carbon layers together will eventually fail. The main rule to follow with data is to have as many copies as possible.