First off, hello and glad to be here. OK, I am interested in the opinions from my fellow tekies on the lifespan of a new hard drive loaded to the hilt with images, video's, documents and maybe a few progs. The hard drive will be promptly removed from the computer and carefully stored in a controlled environment. I am thinking of obtaining a couple of IDE or SATA drives and duplicating my backup between 2 drives. I am 46 years old. (if it helps in your calculations)... Will my great or great greats, or future historians/archeologists be able to view the majority of the content in say 100 or more years(if the human race survives that long)from now? If you think not, please give your thoughts on how long they may be readable, and any means of storage which would help in it's longetivity. I know this could be a deep subject, but I am interested in the basics of the concept. Thanks in advance!
Well HDDs are rigid magnetic media, so 10-15 years tops. After that they will be too far degraded to do much with them. Sorry, the technology's just not that great yet! Then again, in 10 years there's a very good chance that technology will be sufficiently advanced to the point where magnetic media is a thing of the past. At that point, you could theoretically migrate your data to the most reliable storage media of the day.
