TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Although I have seen some early SCSI drives that (amazingly) have proven to start and run after a decade of unuse, I wouldn’t recommend them for archival storage either. While I believe most/all modern drives have gone to air bearings for spindles (as opposed to lubricants), it’s still a well-known phenomena that a high percentage of drive failures occur after a drive has been shut down for some period and restarted. I haven’t seen statistics as to the cause, but one cause we discovered after dissecting bad returned drives was the heads stuck in the accumulated debris that flaked off the magnetic media on the outside tracks of the platter where the heads are often parked on shut down.

AndyH Loc: Massachusetts and New Hampshire

Whether spinning or SSD, I make a habit of opening and checking all external drives on a quarterly basis. Cheap insurance IMHO.

Andy

gessman Loc: Colorado

Thanks Trix. I try to keep up somewhat but shortly after retirement many years ago I realized that the "pipeline" into my basement doesn't always deliver the latest stuff. That info in Wikipedia is subject to lay there for 50 years or more. It seemed fairly recent in that it referred to 2017 as a baseline year for common practice and I emphasized it because SSDs were recommended earlier in the thread as permanent storage, not as active backup where a relatively constant source of power is available. Apparently there's a big difference.

NOTE: This was intended to be in response to TriX. Sorry!

DJphoto Loc: SF Bay Area

As previous posters have mentioned, you should have 3 copies of your data, with one of those in the cloud. I use a PC, but the same process applies for a Mac. I have had excellent luck with Western Digital drives, so that is what I buy. My internal 2 TB drive is almost full, so I'm replacing it with a WD Black 6 TB drive. I have been using a WD 2 TB My Book for backup, and a new WD 8 TB is arriving tomorrow to take care of backup duties with the new 6 TB drive. I also have all of my photos on Dropbox. I also have a second internal 2 TB drive that I store another copy of my photos on. I have two additional 2 TB external drives to keep an extra copy off-site (I rotate them periodically- ideally every week or two). Call me paranoid, but storage is cheap. One of our daughters uses a Mac and has a photography business. She got the same 8 TB My Book today for backup and stores a copy of her photos in her website as well.