A hard drive sitting on a shelf is a big question mark. Will it spin-up? Who knows?!
So you deal with this by having a backup. Now you have 2x the cost.
But, unfortunately, you could have two hard drives not spin up. You consider an additional backup, but at this point you're at 3x the cost, so you start to reconsider letting hard drives sit on shelves.
Now you're in RAID country. RAID is not a backup, but by shifting your focus to availability you now have an approach to dealing with the "will it spin-up?" issue by proactively dealing with the problem via monitoring and rebuilds when necessary. You keep several replacement HDDs on hand for this inevitability.
Now, since you know RAID is not a backup, you put a backup system in place. This is additional cost; even more if you go 3-2-1.
So now you've got hard drives, storage arrays, HBAs, backups, and the power all of this consumes. We're starting to get out of cheap territory.
I suppose what I'm trying to say is: If you have a lot of data, hard drives are only cheap if you don't care availability, integrity, and longevity.
I hate comments like this. This is Hacker News, we are highly tech educated and wealthy on average. I specced a 71 TB usable array that can survive losing 3 of 8 drives.
$2000. (shucked drives, but this includes the server and ECC)
If the data is invaluable, throw down a couple of these at homes of friends and family.
I have 10 x 20 TiB volumes, software RAID6, across multiple storage arrays. I wrote my comment from experience.
I still don't consider it "cheap" even though I make a good chunk of change like many on this website, but I think this is because I think in terms of what my friends & family could afford.
Brings up an interesting topic: if I wanted to preserve a movie for 100,000 or even 1,000,000 years, how would I do it? What physical media would last that long, and could actually be played back correctly and accurately by some archaeologist in the year 1,002,025?
Plated of quartz, etched internally via focused femtosecond pulsed-laser to create tiny voids or just changes in crystal lattice that encode bits as changes in the polarization of light passing back through the glass.
It's been studied in various ways for a while now.
Funnily enough I remember reading somewhere that this was some of The Daily Show’s secret sauce in where they would DVR/record all the other news programs.
It seems there was a lawsuit that they won, then lost on appeal, and then the Supreme Court decided not to let it escalate further.
> This case stems from a copyright infringement case filed by Fox News back in 2013 against TVEyes [...]
> On December 3rd [2018], the U.S. Supreme Court denied a petition for writ of certiorari in TVEyes, Inc. v. Fox News Network, LLC, declining the opportunity to decide what would have been the Court’s first case on fair use in a copyright context in 20 years. [1]
Other content lost in the purge were clips and full episodes of other short-lived late-night entries like The Opposition with Jordan Klepper, The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, the Chris Hardwick-hosted @midnight (predecessor to After Midnight), and Lights Out with David Spade.
To quote Life of Brian "I know where to get it if you want it" ... these shows were archived as they aired.
I imagine that finding copies of much of that will be difficult. I know someone who took to the high seas for episodes of the Colbert Report, but how many people are still seeding full seasons of that, let alone shows like Lights Out which were nowhere near as popular.
There are still private trackers going on two decades old now with packrat members who have home NAS systems with everything they've ever watched saved away and shared on request with other members in good standing .. less high seas piracy, more community of collectors with digital VHS tapes.
