&gt; the way storage media devices have been going...<p>My experience is that drives have been getting substantially better in this regard. If a drive is failing, it will usually collapse into read only mode and let you know that it is failing, giving you ample time to recover data.<p>That said, I do think backups are a good idea, and that Reed-Solomon codes are a good way to protect your data. I also think that managing bitrot is really the responsibility of the drive itself and maybe of the filesystem. Zfs and btrfs both offer bitrot protection.<p>And even solving bitrot, risks like fires, earthquakes, or war (for less fortunate countries) mean that data should be backed up in multiple physical locations anyway.<p>These are problems I&#x27;ve been attempting to address at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sia.tech" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sia.tech</a> for the past two years. It&#x27;s still in beta, but a full platform should be ready by March.