“What is the point of buying an external hard drive if it will fail? What do I do with all my photos/personal data?”

(Answer requested by Vithush Gugan)

Oh, come on. If “eventual failure” is disqualifying, you’ve just disqualified the entire known universe!

Entropy is universal. Everything eventually fails.

Rather than trying to find something that lasts forever (nothing does) look for things that are useful for reasonable amounts of time.

For example, an external hard drive will typically have a reliable service life of 3–5 years… and sometimes *lots* more. (I have some still-working 15-year-old hard drives; I use them for periodic, redundant archiving.)

Virtually all current drives support SMART monitoring, which can give you plenty of advanced warning when a drive begins to wear out; well before there’s much risk of data loss. So, after 3, 4, 5… or 15+ years, when the drive finally starts to wear out, you buy a new one and transfer the data from the old drive to the new. What’s the big deal?

Besides, you should never, ever put all your data eggs in one basket. If you have valuable data (of any kind — photos, music, tax records, whatever) it should be stored redundantly, in more than one place — an original, and at least one backup, stored someplace that’s not part of the same physical system/setup as the original. (e.g. a copy in your phone or PC, and a copy in the cloud; or phone/PC and external drive; etc.)

Two physically separate, redundant storage systems are unlikely to die at the exact same time. So, when one does eventually die, you just copy your files from the working device to a replacement second device/location. It’s really not a big deal.

So, yes, eventually, all hardware will die, but so what? If you keep your data preserved in multiple, physically-separated copies; and refresh or replace your storage mediums as they age and wear out; your data really can live more or less forever!

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