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This is also true. Having also lost data on two hard drives kept in a drawer for just over a couple years I can totally confirm that, however it was a isolated

This is also true. Having also lost data on two hard drives kept in a drawer for just over a couple years I can totally confirm that, however it was a isolated incident probably also due to some physical issues in the drives, although they weren't old and SMART would report them as 100% healthy. After those two years both drives were completely dead, not just unreadable; ultimately I could bring one to life again after removing and carefully cleaning the controller pcb; however it still required a complete reformat as the data was gone, while the second remained dead. Now I rotate them so that every few years I copy all data to new disks while keeping the old ones until the next rotation: half of my NAS drives become offline backup disks, the other half I use as spare backup disk (with aggressive spindown etc) in some PCs, so I have both live and offline backups. Data should be safe, hopefully:)

369548684892826 4y ago
Wondering if you do any checking for bitrot? I mean, if some files on one of your disks became corrupt over time how would you know before it becomes too late to recover it from older backups?
- squarefoot 4y ago
  I'm no sysadmin so my knowledge in the field is limited. I'm relying on ZFS mirrors which hopefully should be a bit better than the alternatives at bit rot protection, but admittedly if I was hit by corruption at that level that would catch me unprepared. I'm open to suggestions however.
  - 369548684892826 4y ago
    > I'm no sysadmin so my knowledge in the field is limited. Same here, but my primary backup is also using ZFS mirrors. I have one cronjob that once a month runs 'zpool scrub mypool' to validate all checksums as a bitrot test, and then a day later another one to email me the results of 'zpool status'. If that email contains "state: ONLINE" then no issues were found. But I've pieced this together myself and would also be open to anyone's suggestions!

369548684892826 4y ago

Wondering if you do any checking for bitrot? I mean, if some files on one of your disks became corrupt over time how would you know before it becomes too late to recover it from older backups?

squarefoot 4y ago
I'm no sysadmin so my knowledge in the field is limited. I'm relying on ZFS mirrors which hopefully should be a bit better than the alternatives at bit rot protection, but admittedly if I was hit by corruption at that level that would catch me unprepared. I'm open to suggestions however.
- 369548684892826 4y ago
  > I'm no sysadmin so my knowledge in the field is limited. Same here, but my primary backup is also using ZFS mirrors. I have one cronjob that once a month runs 'zpool scrub mypool' to validate all checksums as a bitrot test, and then a day later another one to email me the results of 'zpool status'. If that email contains "state: ONLINE" then no issues were found. But I've pieced this together myself and would also be open to anyone's suggestions!