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question about "bit rot"
I've been thinking about hard disks as long-term storage, and I've realized that magnetic domains on hard disk actually aren't permanent. The field strength decreases by more than 1%/year. So even for a hard disk that is never used, your data on it will gradually fade away. Errors will increase on time scales of years. This is well understood.
As far as I can tell, the only way to prevent this is to completely rewrite your hard disk data once in a while. Every year or two? Very little cogent info about mitigation strategy that I can find.
That makes me wonder about SuperDuper smart updates, which just write things that have changed. Things that haven't changed don't get rewritten. So after a while, much of your archive disk data can get stale. Is this a concern? As in, is it smart to do a full up backup every once in a while instead of smart update? Some expert advice would be handy.
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