question about "bit rot"

[Dan Lester]

Originally Posted by dnanian

I take a major OS update as an opportunity to do a full backup, Dan. On top of that, I use a number of backup volumes, some of which are RAID and get scrubbed, to ensure that things are generally safe. Plus, I use online backup... your best approach is thorough, diverse coverage.

I certainly agree that diverse coverage is good. But if you have a few archive disks that you only do incremental SuperDuper backups on, there is a good chance that after a decade none of them will work.

Are you aware of any Mac utilities that do disk refreshing? I think there used to be one, called DiskRrefresher, but that's no longer available. There are PC utilities that do this. There was, many years ago, a post about doing disk refreshes in a Unix-based system ...

https://larryjordan.com/articles/tec...-disk-storage/

but I frankly think those techniques don't really do what he says they do.

It would be nice to see some well-thought-out strategy for long term archiving on hard disks. I realize that's not necessarily the purpose of SuperDuper, but your insights would be welcome.