Yes, hard drives die, but they've also been getting cheaper by leaps and bounds. In the past few years, I seem to be getting a new system about ever 3 years or so, and a newer, faster and bigger hard drive about every year or so. I migrate my stuff from drive to drive as I suspect most folks do.

If one drive dies, I have copies not only on other hard drives, but on my backup media as well. I'll keep this scheme running until I'm no longer able to do so. Then it will be up to whomever to either save my stuff as valuable, or trash it as dross.

I figure this is the real problem. Hard drives will fail, but the value of your personal records will be next to zero once you are gone. Unless you are famous or your progeny care about what you wrote in your tech blog in the year 2002, you can pretty much kiss it all goombye.

And speaking as someone who has had to deal with the estate of someone who DID print everything out, do yourself and your relatives a favor: Destroy the unimportant stuff. We had to rent a dumpster and a shredder to get rid of all this person's stuff. The paper was stored in a damp basement and so most of the stuff was rendered usless by mold or water damage or both.

When looked upon this way, upgrading a hard drive storage system every two years or so and making backups is FAR more economical and safe.

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