dr100B
It depends which program you’re using, for example even tar will preserve hard links. Or on the other side something like duplicacy will just deduplicate everything that has the same content.
Will rot away on anything, use or no use, at least in this universe. It’s called entropy. Have multiple copies, check them periodically and refresh as they die.
Yea, I don’t get this “race to the impossibly worse format”. There were (even multiple) posts about saving wikipedia to pdf, I mean what for? The result will be impossibly larger and harder to use in any way as far as finding the article you want and navigating around, plus the format itself is just bad without reflow for reading on anything else except precisely one device of a certain (display/window) size and resolution.
NAS drives are the “shut up about your disk being slow, your gigabit is even slower” category (back when they were introduced most NASes couldn’t even fill up the gigabit, if they had it at all). That is if anyone asks how they’re different from the “DAS” and “Server” category. That somehow the marketing was so successful that now they’re considered superior to the others is another story.
What else should I consider to make an educated decision?
At first what you want to do with them? Do you want blazing fast network access for video editing? Do you want to run a Plex server? Nextcloud? Synology Photos (or anything else Synology offers for sync or something else)? Or photoprism/immich or similar? And so on …
Back up as soon as possible everything you care about from there, starting with the small stuff. Then next time when you have “some important data” have multiple copies of it and check them periodically.
You can get it with adb on non-rooted android: https://gist.github.com/ctrl-freak/24ac0e61b7cf550a6945
What are the emails precisely saying? Anyway, just put rclone on it and start downloading.
Is this from a region where “Damaged” has another meaning than the usual one?