How long do digital files actually last? Backups explained simply
Digitising is not the finish line. A short, non-technical explanation of the 3-2-1 rule and why one hard drive is not a backup.
5 min read
Digital files don't fade, but the things they live on fail without warning. Hard drives have a meaningful failure rate within five years. USB sticks left in drawers corrupt silently. Cloud accounts close when subscriptions lapse or when nobody knows the password after a death.
The 3-2-1 rule
Keep three copies of anything you'd be upset to lose, on two different kinds of storage, with one copy in a different building. For a family archive that usually means: the copy on your computer, a copy on an external drive, and a copy in a cloud account.
Choose formats that will still open
JPEG, TIFF, MP4, and WAV are all widely supported, decades old, and readable by essentially every device. Avoid proprietary formats produced by a single company's software — those are the files that become unopenable, not the storage media.
Write the access details down
The most common way a family loses a digital archive is not drive failure. It's that only one person knew where it was and how to get into it. Put the account, the password location, and the drive's whereabouts in the same place as the will.
Check it once a year
Open a handful of files each January. Five minutes annually catches a failing drive while the other copies are still healthy.
Trusted with family archives
Umberdosh Restoration
Every order ships as a secure download link, and a USB stick is available if you'd like a second physical copy.
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