My lab acquired a lot of imaging data (10 TB a year) and notoriously would store it long-term by putting the hardrive back in thr grey static plastic bag and pu

My lab acquired a lot of imaging data (10 TB a year) and notoriously would store it long-term by putting the hardrive back in thr grey static plastic bag and putting it in a wooden office drawer. Surprise, 80% of the drives were unreadable after a few years. I suggested tape, but it was so hard as a grad student to figure out anything about how to even get it set up! Not to mention academic labs in bio departments are notoriously stingy! I found a tape drive in Newegg and took the better part of a year to set it up (learning half baked that I needed this card and that cable etc). And then finally set up the tapes to back up. Its been years since I left the lab and I heard that no one there knows how to read the data back from the tapes! I wish things were better than this! My only anecdotal insight was that hard drives don't fail easily if they are continuously running. So I managed to hoard enough drives to keep at least two copies of data I cared about, and used a program called Mirror folder to make backups that were still easily accessible without any software lock-in by any grad student in the future.