I read that magnetic HDDs can lose data with age as the magnetism weakens in spots.
I have a more than 1 TB and growing archive copied onto several magnetic hard drives (each drive has the whole archive) and I want to have the best chance of all the data surviving intact for at least another 20 years. The oldest files in the archive were copied onto the oldest drives nearly 10 years ago. I think I need to refresh the HDDs files.
I would take the newest copy of the archive and, for each of the other HDDs in turn, reformat it and copy the archive to it.
Do you recommend this as a way to preserve the data? Will copying a large amount of data be 100% accurate USB - PC - USB?