[Const-me]

> if they are stored unpowered for a couple of years, then you clearly aren't doing regular backups

I am doing regular backups yet I have a few backup disks unpowered for years. They are older, progressively smaller backup HDDs I keep for extra redundancy.

Every 2-4 years I am getting a larger backup drive, and clone my previous backup drive to the new one. This way when the backup drive fails (happened around 2013 because I was unfortunate to get notoriously unreliable 3TB Seagate), I don’t lose much data if at all because most of the new stuff is still on the computers, and the old stuff is left on these older backup drives.

[optionalsquid]

I do basically the same, but instead of keeping everything around I just keep the last two drives in rotation at the same time: One kept at home and one kept at work. One of them failed recently, while I was performing a backup, so I just got a new (and larger) drive, and synced it with the other backup drive before continuing as usual