My father told me he wanted to make USB flash drives of all the scanned and digitized family photos and other assorted letters and mementos. He planned to distribute them to all family members hoping that at least one set would survive. When I explained that they ought to be recipes to new media every N number of years or risk deteriorating or becoming unreadable (like a floppy disk when you have no floppy drive), he was genuinely shocked. He lost interest in the project that he’d thought was so bullet proof.
I got four HDDs, some are almost 10 years old. They work great but I know that won’t be for forever.
The only one that didn’t die because of my own fault (two externals and a laptop one sigh), was one of the infamous IBM/Hitachi Deathstars.
