What's the best drive for cold storage?

[Stickwood Jr]

Currently I have all my data sitting on a 1tb SSD that has been in use for nearly 8 years, I'm going to replace this but aside from that I want a drive I can use to backup everything onto it and leave it unplugged until I want to back up my desktop again. Currently I'm looking at this drive. It's high enough capacity enough that it should last me a long while, and i saw in a forum that this should be good for long term cold storage. Any suggestions on what drive to use would be great!

[quater]

I generally uses whatever is cheaply available. better to back up more often then on cheap drive then to uses high quality drives and put to mush trust in them.

Oh and i also uses mainly 2,5" usb drives for cold storage. They are often cheap, i heard they are more robust (don’t know if true) but it is easy because they have USB and don’t need extra power.

 

Recently a SSD that was 2-3 years in uses and then was sitting 2-3 years unused in a box died on me.

 

[kirashi]

13 minutes ago, Stickwood Jr said:

Currently I have all my data sitting on a 1tb SSD that has been in use for nearly 8 years, I'm going to replace this but aside from that I want a drive I can use to backup everything onto it and leave it unplugged until I want to back up my desktop again. Currently I'm looking at this drive. It's high enough capacity enough that it should last me a long while, and i saw in a forum that this should be good for long term cold storage. Any suggestions on what drive to use would be great!

All drives fail eventually, so there is no "best" drive when it comes to data longevity. However, Enterprise drives generally offer longer warranties and/or sometimes come with a one-time data recovery service, so you may find that of use. The best strategy when it comes to backing up data is to always have multiple copies of your data so you can recover it in the event of a failure.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/

[SydneyBrokeIt]

Go for a spinning drive.  The unpowered loss of SSDs is a thing.

 

A USB one should be a good bet - then you're more likely to use it to back up, forward compatibility should be good, etc.

 

However, you should definitely be following the 3-2-1 strategy, in addition.  Three copies (minimum), with 2 local-to-you, preferably on different models of drives, at least with two different batches if you can swing it if you're using the same drive, and then one off-site backup (drive in a storage warehouse, cloud backup, etc).