I'm looking to backup TB's of photos which are totally irreplaceable. I have two offsite cloud based backups with Backblaze and Flickr and I'm looking to add another backup that is a bit more physical. If I was to copy nearly 3TB of data onto a 4TB HDD and then put it into a safe deposit box, how long would the data "survive" for? I won't need to add any more data to the drive as these were many thousands of photos that were scanned in over 3-4 years and have since sadly been destroyed in a fire. I did look at triple layer Blu-Rays but at £200 per 500GB it will work out very expensive. I also imagine that a scratch on a Blu-Ray disc could wipe out a noticeable chunk of data!
Some sites say data can survive for 8 years and some say over a decade. Then of course you find articles about the defunct Megaupload site where the hard drives were unreadable after only 4 years. Also, what would reset the timer? If the data would survive for say 6 years and I pulled the drive out at 5 years and powered it on for 5 minutes, would that give it another 6 years? Would I have to defrag it or something, run a disk check maybe?
Some sites say data can survive for 8 years and some say over a decade. Then of course you find articles about the defunct Megaupload site where the hard drives were unreadable after only 4 years. Also, what would reset the timer? If the data would survive for say 6 years and I pulled the drive out at 5 years and powered it on for 5 minutes, would that give it another 6 years? Would I have to defrag it or something, run a disk check maybe?