Hello all!
I've seen variations of this question asked before. I am wondering what you do with your old harddrives, and in particular, do you consider them "reliable" enough as a backup cold storage solution?
I'm talking about the hardware like a 8+ year old drive that still functions perfectly well, but it's due for an upgrade, or it taking up space. Would it be reasonable to put sold long-term backup storage items on these drives, seal them, and store it in the basement?
The concern I have is that an unreliable backup is no backup at all. If the drive is aging, I'm not sure how to estimate how "unreliable" it truly is.
I saw one madman on here with a 24 drive enclosure full of old harddrives with a specialized filesystem to act as a backup. Though that's not in the budget for this year.