TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Yes, that’s the problem. History shows that you need to migrate your data to new media every 20 years or so.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

Pure hype.

The maximum lifetime of any style of storage medium these days is probably less than 50 years. After that, the medium could be readable but the technology will have moved on so that you no longer can buy the readers/writers or update the drivers to new operating systems. How long did people use floppy disks? CDs/DVDs? Technology moving on will also mean that you will need larger capacity storage devices. The first home computers had less than a megabyte of storage. Now we're using Terabytes. What will we need in 50 years? (The M-discs are only around 100 Gbytes last I heard). 1000 years? What kind of data storage did they have in 1024? Printing wasn't even invented then.

Part of backup/archiving is Maintenance. That includes transferring your data to newer technology storage systems as they become available (and tested). It also includes verifying your data so it is not corrupted by the transfer.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

I agree the life is limited by the ability to read them. That projected lifetime number comes from extensive DOD testing. It’s no different from calculated MTBF numbers. Last I looked, the MTBF of a typical enterprise spinning drive is in excess of 1 million hours (!)

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

About 114 years
@ around 8765 hours/year (24 * 365.2425)

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

ExFAT IS cross-platform compatible, but it is very dangerous. If you unplug the drive when it is mounted with open files , there is an EXTREMELY high likelihood you will lose data. I know this from personal experience. Fortunately, I had a double backup.

Flyerace Loc: Mt Pleasant, WI

If you are going to add to your collection of personal photos, I wouldn't limit my external drive to 400GB or even 1TB.

I went to three 8TB drives. One is the master and the other two are copies. One can go to your bank safety deposit box and the other two can be on your desk. Then process your little heart out.

I purchased Western Digital externals and I'm very happy with them. I replace them between 4 and 7 years old. (I'm just that way. I also change out all of my electrical surge protectors every 2-3 years. No I don't have a ton of money, but I value the experiences documented through my photos more than money. It seems that every year memory gets cheaper and it makes sense to have more capacity than needed.)

therwol Loc: USA

I was not aware of the danger with exFAT. The OP uses a Mac. I thought that cross platform compatibility would be desirable. I have sent gigs of family photos to my daughter on external hard drives formatted exFAT. She uses a Mac. So far no problems, but I'll warn her.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

I still use ExFAT when needed, but I have a big note taped to my hub cable that says, UNMOUNT DRIVES! It's important, since I use a MacBook Air for everything.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

This!

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

You’re right about both the drives and the surge protectors. Most household surge protectors use MOVs, which have a limited life. Every time they take a hit, they are degraded, until they become useless, and if they’re hit with continuous voltage outside their capacity, they’re destroyed.

bwana Loc: Bergen, Alberta, Canada

I use an external storage device called Wavlink which allows me to easily use any existing unhoused HD or SSD for backup or standalone cloning. Works like a charm for any of my numerous 1TB thru 12TB drives.

bwa

therwol Loc: USA

The 1000 year longevity of M-Discs only refers to the media. Everything you say is true, but to a few people, that's what matters now. Yes, we went from punch cards to paper tape to magnetic tape to big floppies to little floppies to various flavors of hard drives along the way to the current ones. We have cloud storage. Operating systems have changed. We can only know what we know now and use our best judgement. It is inevitible that new technology and protocols will come along. One thing for certain is that if you have a reader, your data on M-Discs will be intact for your lifetime. If you must know, I've only used M-Discs to archive rare movies I've come across. I don't use them to archive files. I'm comfortable with triple backing up my files with one copy offsite and my most important files in the cloud. It's a judgement call.

Just a brief story. When floppies were king, I put a lot of files on them. Most of them are of no value to me now, but when I tried to view them to decide what to keep, about half of the floppies couldn't be read. Longevity can matter.

DaveyDitzer Loc: Western PA

The floppies and any magnetic tape will degrade because the particles will move out of alignment due to "relaxation" of the polymer matrix in which the particles are embedded. That's why old VHS tapes, even when not played, turn crappy (sorry about technical terms:) Ditto cassette tapes.

therwol Loc: USA

Watch this. What a coincidence that this popped up on my news feed. The San Francisco trains depend on floppy discs to run?????? 5 inch, no less. Unmute the video to hear the story.

https://abc7news.com/san-francisco-train-system-has-been-running-on-floppy-disks-but-city-fears-catastrophic-failure-before-upgrade/14624828/

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

Actually, the longest used storage medium seems to be punch cards. They were invented in 1801 to control Jacquard looms in textile factories. They were used in their most familiar form for data sorting by businesses in the early 1900s. We used them in the late '60s for computer programs. Maybe a bit in the early '70s, but that's probably about it.