Will rot away on anything, use or no use, at least in this universe. It's called entropy. Have multiple copies, check them periodically and refresh as they die.
this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
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I’m confused, I’m not totally 100% sure what you mean by entropy in the context of storage media, would you mind elaborating?
No. But HDD may fail for various reasons.
It is likely that the files will be fine for years. But they may become corrupt tomorrow.
You need multiple copies, on different types of media. And check/migrate regularly.
To the best of my knowledge and reading many insightful posts here, magnetic HDD have a higher chance preserving data if stored in good conditions (no water or humidity, far from magnetic fields, …). SSDs as I was told need to be powered in order to preserve data begging the question about the usefulness of external SSDs.
Unless the hdd is stored in a high moisture environment, your data should be safe enough. Worst case, the spindle of the motor gets stuck but even there are ways to get the data pulled