Comment by jjav

> data needs to be validated regularly and cycled to a new media every 5-10 years in order to ensure it’s safe and easily accessible

I used to do that but found it to be a gamble. I have files back to the 80s, so I rotated them from 5.25" floppies to 3.5" floppies to zip drives to CD-R and the DVD-R. But it's a fragile system, files can get corrupted somewhere along the line and if I didn't migrate in time it can be hard to go back. For instance I lost a handful of files during the iomega zip drive phase when the drive died and I had no way to recover (and the files weren't that important to try to source a new iomega drive).

Now I simply keep everything online in a big zfs mirror pool.