Question on long term hard drive storage

[thomas]

Hows it going everyone.
Had a question, im going to be storing my off-site Photo archive hard drives in a safe deposit box at my bank, so im wondering if there are any issues regarding off-line hard drives in long term storage ( for example, is it possible for the data on the drives to become corrupt/damaged due to long term storage and not being on-line for a long time, or any other issues)
Thanks

[Ken]

There is always the possibility that a platter that has not spun in some time could stick (it used to be that the lubricant could get gummy after long periods of no use).  This used to be an issue in the past, but I am not certain if the current crop of drives can be impacted by this potential problem.

[peterkrogh]

Thomas,
Best practice would be to spin them up periodically, maybe every 3 or six months.

I'd also suggest using ImageVerifier to make a hash of the drives, so that when you spin them up, you can see that everything is in the same condition as you left it.
Peter

[thomas]

That's the first ive heard of image verifier, cool...thanks Peter.

[peterkrogh]

Thomas,
I'm just starting to thoroughly test it, and I've just seen something pretty scary.

I copied a bunch of files to a new drive, ran Disk Warrior - all is good.

Ran Image Verifier, and it flagged one DNG (so far) among the 16,000 as being likely invalid.  It shows a thumbnail in Bridge, and builds a thumbnail in iView, but, it is indeed a damaged file that cannot open into Photoshop.

The version of the file on the primary drive is fine, so this is either a media problem, or a copy problem.  Without ImageVerifier, I'd have no idea that there was a problem.  This is pretty disconcerting, and means I'll be doing a lot of verification over the next few months.

Peter