Spent Saturday afternoon doing something I'd been putting off since basically forever: going through the drawer under my desk where old hard drives go to die. Not to be dramatic about it, but there were nine of them in there. Nine. A 2011-era Western Digital MyBook that still has the sticker price on it ($89.99, which felt like a lot back then). A LaCie Rugged that I bought specifically because I dropped its predecessor down a flight of stairs. A couple of unlabeled 2.5" drives I genuinely could not identify without plugging them in.
So I plugged them in. All of them, one after another, over the course of about four hours, because I only have two working USB-to-SATA adapters and one of them is flaky.
Here's the thing nobody tells you about a decade and a half of "backing things up": you don't actually know what's on any of it until you look. I had convinced myself, in some vague hand-wavy way, that these drives held a tidy archive of photos and old project files, organized by year, ready to be consolidated whenever I got around to it. What I actually found was six different partial copies of my 2013-2015 photo library, three of them corrupted in ways that only showed up when I tried to open specific files, a folder called "IMPORTANT DO NOT DELETE" that contained nothing but screenshots of tweets, and one drive that just would not spin up at all. Click, click, silence. That one's probably gone for good, and as far as I can tell it had a chunk of video from a trip to Portugal in 2016 that doesn't exist anywhere else. I'm mostly at peace with that, though "mostly" is doing some work in that sentence.
The bigger realization, and the actual reason I'm writing this instead of just complaining to my wife about it (which I also did, extensively), is that "backup" isn't a noun, it's a verb you have to keep doing. A drive sitting in a drawer isn't a backup, it's a bet that the drive will still spin up whenever you eventually need it, and apparently that bet has maybe a 70% hit rate over ten years based on my very unscientific Saturday. I always assumed spinning rust was the safe, boring choice compared to cloud storage. Turns out boring and reliable aren't the same thing if the boring thing is just sitting unpowered on a shelf accumulating dust and however many small failures happen when nobody's watching.
What I ended up doing: consolidated everything salvageable onto two new 4TB drives, kept as duplicates of each other, one of which now lives at my in-laws' place an hour away because a fire or a burglary shouldn't be able to take both copies at once. That's the 3-2-1 backup rule everyone quotes and almost nobody actually follows, and I include past-me in "almost nobody." The eight old drives are getting wiped and either sold or recycled, except the dead one, which is going in an actual trash can, not a drawer, because apparently I need to make that distinction explicit to myself.
I also finally set up an offsite copy of the small archive I keep for this blog itself — fifteen years of posts, a handful of old image dumps, the export from when I moved off the original Wordpress install in 2014. That one lives on a small VPS now instead of a folder on my laptop, partly because I wanted something that survives a laptop dying and partly because it forced me to actually think about the server side of things for the first time in a while. I ended up provisioning it through Tricknowtech since I already had a domain sitting there and it was less friction than spinning up something new from scratch on a Saturday when my patience was already thin from four hours of drive-adapter roulette.
None of this is exciting technology. There's no product launch here, no new chip, nothing you'd read about anywhere else. Just a guy with a drawer full of dead drives learning, again, a lesson he apparently needed to relearn every few years. If you've got a similar drawer sitting under your own desk right now, this is your sign to go check it before it tells you no.