Back the fuck up! If you only have one copy, you have none.

Yeah, I’m at the point where I view all storage as temporary, just on different time scales. Storing anything indefinitely requires ongoing maintenance to replace degraded media with fresh media.

Yeah, lots of newbies fall victim to this. Nobody wants to believe hard drives fail, until their hard drive is dead and they’ve lost all their data.

I believe there’s a saying along the lines of “nobody wants to build earthquake-proof houses before the first earthquake.”

Yea but literally nothing is. The best thing you could do is have multiple backups in multiple locations.

Unless you use mdiscs. Those still degrade, but it’ll take centuries.