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How much time until an unused disconnected hard drive loses its data?

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SpaceRay
SpaceRay

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I just wanted to put a topic that may be interesting and important to know and to be aware of and is

How much time until the data is kept safe for an unused hard drive loses its data?

How to keep your data safe and do not lose it?


Is probably that you may have some external hard drives that you have stored somewhere and you only use occasionally and they are not connected to your computer

Do you have any hard drive that you have since many years ago?

They are magnetic and this does not last forever

What is your own experience with data stored for long time?

What do you do to keep your hard drives in good state?

Quote
The longevity of the data stored on any drive depends on the conditions where it is stored and for how long. For hard drives, there are three main factors: magnetic field breakdown, environmental conditions, and mechanical failure.


Here is this interesting explanation about what happens with a hard drive storage

how much time does it take for a hard drive to lose data.

It seems that to be safe and keep the drive in a good readable state

Quote
To periodically refresh the data on the drive, simply transfer it to another location, and re-writing it back to the drive.

That way, the magnetic domains in the physical disk surface will be renewed with their original strength (because you just re-wrote the files back to the disk).

If you're concerned about filesystem corruption, you can also format the disk before transferring the data back.


How often would this be needed?

Quote
The conventional wisdom is that you should revisit your data every five years to make sure that you can still read it. The general consensus is that the magnetic platters in the drive will start to degrade in 5 years of storage. The bigger issue is that storage technology changes. That means a format that works today will be unreadable 5-10 years from now.

The best option you really have is to have multiple copies on multiple formats and to check on the data at least once or twice a decade. That's really the only way to make sure that the data is both intact and on a format that can still be read.
Posted: July 1, 2020 8:27 pm   Details E-Mail

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