Can I trust a brand new HDD to last a decade?

No.

That is why Backups are a thing.
Nothing is ever completely safe.
Ever.

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All I know is that the m-disc is advertised to last longer, and bd-xl is 4x capacity.

You can get a tape drive for pretty cheap, and tapes very inexpensive for their capacity. They are also repairable in the case of physical destruction. You can get a tape re-spooled for much less than it costs to recover data from a busted HDD.

I have already gone through and decided what I will get rid of but still want to keep alot of stuff like (pictures movies and music) , I already know that I will not be storing software and stuff like that for the long term.

also I will not be using upload sites

  1. I don’t trust them
  2. Financially i’m a believer in the one lump sum payment rather than monthly subscriptions
    1 TB of storage is about $10 per month, say I want to store for 5 years before ill consider re-copying to new media that means ill have paid $600 for online storage or I could pay $300 up front for a mdisc burner and 1,250 gb worth of m-disc’s

but I guess what Im really trying to research is should I go with the “regular Blu-ray” option or the “mdisc” option because mdisc is like 3x cost

I could get a blu-ray burner and 20 x 50gb bd-r disc for $120 USD

I could get a mdisc burner and 25 x50gb M-disc for $300 USD

is the extra $180 worth it if Im just going to re transfer the files to another media in 5-10 years

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As long as you have a drive, m-disc should be a nearly perfect solution. I have to look more into that but I might use that as the base of an archival backup system myself.

When it comes to tech it is built to fail. so no to a decade.
I would think a 3 or four sites nas and sync might last 10 years or you can let google or amazon all up in your data and in 10 years it will be mined and still there.
Trusting one hard drive to cold store data…

i’d say that you can not trust a single hard drive of any vintage.

use raid if you need uptime

have off site backups whether you have raid or not. computers get stolen as well as fail. data also gets lost due to either software or user problems as well, not just hard drive failure.

But there is bit rot. That’s why there are EC Components on modern hdds.
Just buy a external hdd and only plug it into your computer when you need to access something on it.

Also, HGST or hatachi are the best. Hands down.
If you want something cheaper, buy a Toshiba.
WD is average and Seagate is garbage

Drobo’s are easy to use, so look into them.

I think this is kind of relevant to this conversation: