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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?

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    You should be more worried about accessing that data in 20 years, not if that data is there since SATA like IDE is being replaced as a standard.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Sep 5, 2018 at 20:14
  • @Ramhound there still exist PCs with and adapters for ports which were introduced and in use two decades ago so... not a major concern.
    – undo
    Commented Sep 7, 2018 at 18:33
  • @rahuldottech - I cannot find a single motherboard, released in the last 5 years, that directly support an IDE drive. Likewise, M.2 is well on its way to replace SATA.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Sep 7, 2018 at 18:38

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You are correct. The time required to loose that data depends on many environmental factors, as well as the quality of the manufacture of the drive(s) themselves. Another thing to watch out for is "induction". This occurs (is emitted from) all (live) electric cabling -- even in small amounts from shielded cable. Heck, WiFi itself is a form of induction. Albeit "controlled". Anyway, I only mention it. Because the worst offender is power cables. The ones you use to plug in your lamps, computers, etc. If you should leave a drive next to one, there's a good chance your drive will become "re-magnatized". Rendering most, if not all your data lost.

If I were you, I'd invest in an SSD sizable enough to accumulate your current, as well as any future data. The data is put on these drives by "bit flipping". The only way to change these drives is by giving them an electrical charge (plugging them in). The likelihood that these would ever fail you in the future is slim to none.

HTH

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