Hard drives from the last 20 years are now slowly dying.
Isnt the standard preservation system tape drives? They tested the longevity of different storage solutions ages ago to avoid stuff like this.
It is. Magnetic tape is still king.
Drive failure in the 00s was really common. I lost 2 or 3 separate drives from different mfg over the course of a couple years. Newer drives are better but even in modern nas setups, I planned on losing at least 1 drive per year on a 4 drive nas even fresh out of the box.
Always keep data your care about in at least 3 places and in at least 2 different mediums with one preferably offsite. I like to have one drive in use, one backup that sync’s daily, and one that I keep in cold storage unplugged. Then swap the sync drve and cold storage drive every so often.
One reason why I love btrfs is the ability to add (and remove) arbitrarily sized drives to the disk array while maintaining multiple redundant copies of my files.
unRAID can do this with both xfs and btrfs.
30 year old hard drives failing?
Color me shocked