Advice on a long term storage solution. Go for a RAID?

[David W. Jones]

Unfortunately thief's always seem to check the fridge for nibbles.

 

[Andrius Simutis]

How does a HDD fail sitting in a box? And even "if" they do at some point won't the data still be there?

Mechanical failure. Sitting for too long, the lubricant in the motor gels and fouls it. The arm that holds the reader head can seize if it doesn't get moved every few months or so.
Other than the read head crashing into a platter when it can't spin up properly, the mechanical failures won't destroy the data, but getting that data off is going to be damn expensive for a data recovery company to disassemble and fix.
Spin up all your archive drives every few months. Just like an old car, they last longer if you turn them on and run them every so often.

 

[alaskacameradude]

If 2 LTO tapes is too expensive, then 2 copies on powered-down hard drives is reasonably safe, if stored properly. Two things I recommend: don't store both copies on the same brand of drive. This is to reduce the risk of a design fault taking out both copies simultaneously. Secondly, power them up and do a scan once a year.

I see many recommendations for optical media, quoting how 10+ year old CDs are still working fine, but I'm very suspicious of the longevity of writable Blu-ray. I have CDs from 1996 that still test fine each year, but they cost over $7 for each 600Mb in quantity.

I on the other hand have the direct opposite opinion stemming from my personal
experience. I have had 5 different external drives fail on me over the last 7 years.
On the other hand, I have been buying Blu Ray disks for a little under $1 each off
Amazon and have over 100 of them full of camera original AVCHD files and not a single
problem with them yet (knock on wood). I can print on the front of them so I know at
a glance what video files are on them, and they are much more resistant to scratches and
smudges than normal DVDs or CDs. I have one of those 'disc scratch removers' and it
has fixed some pretty badly scratched DVDs and CDs. As I said the Blu Rays are not nearly
as easily scratched and I keep them in those 120 disc protective wallets. If one ever did
get scratched I would use my scratch remover on it and hopefully be able to read the disc
and transfer the video to a new disc.

 

[ronedee]

I'm not calling you out. I'm just replying to what you said…..

And then I stated that I have had backups fail, no matter what storage method was used.

Ok... fair enough.

But I haven't had any HDD's used for storage; that I thoroughly tested, and run initially for several days fail. All the other media that you mentioned have failed on me. I would guesti-mate that 99% of all drives fail from running them, not storing them...

I have had HDD's fail that I continually used for months and years. And I've lost data on those drives. Also they usually kept warning me for days, weeks or months before they finally died; w/clicks, mysterious restarts and messages. But I've learned my lesson more than once! I have duplicate drives of everything and hot swap bays on both PC & Mac's I own. So if one HDD unexpectedly fails for any reason? I throw it in the trash and backup the duplicate drive I have stored.

And if my luck is that rotten that both drives end up bad? There is always disk recovery which is about the cost of a new 3TB drive, and pretty reasonable these days. Ron