My father told me he wanted to make USB flash drives of all the scanned and digitized family photos and other assorted letters and mementos. He planned to distribute them to all family members hoping that at least one set would survive. When I explained that they ought to be recipes to new media every N number of years or risk deteriorating or becoming unreadable (like a floppy disk when you have no floppy drive), he was genuinely shocked. He lost interest in the project that he’d thought was so bullet proof.
In my life I’ve had several HDD’s and SSD’s fail on me. None of that shit lasts forever and you would honestly be surprised how often they fail. For huge servers like data centers the average failure rate is between 1% and 2% per year, and sometimes even higher. They literally have to replace hard drives on a daily basis because of failure.
Disk failure is one of the reasons I have copies of all of my important stuff saved to every hard drive on my computer, along with an external just in case. One time my system drive failed and I couldn’t save anything because my operating system stopped working. Had to reinstall the OS and do a data recovery. Ended up with a bunch of photos that were corrupted, distorted, or missing half the photo.
I just replaced a drive today that has been running 24/7 for the last 5.18 years. It hadn’t failed yet but was in a predictive failure state due to the amount of bad sectors it has accumulated. 3 other disks in the same giant raid array are showing some bad sectors but not enough to be over the ‘replace me now’ threshold.