I recently tried to read a small number of 30+ year-old floppy disks containing code I wrote for the Atari ST and they’re all unreadable. The disk surface is noticably degraded.

A mix of buying cheap disks, using non-standard formats to prioritise space over reliability, and waiting too long to duplicate the data.

Lesson learned.

I’ve got three drives in my NAS that are about 12yo

I’ve had one drive die on me and that was in a PC that was inside my house when it experienced a severe fire.

It lasted long enough for me to pull the data to another disk but on the next reboot it died.

These days I have a parity protected nas, a backup nas and and an off-site storage solution with my more essential data. Also cloud for photos.