I have an SSD that has been sitting unpowered for years. I heard that data loss might occur if the drive is not powered on for a while. Is there any program to automate reading all files of a drive so I can power it on, read it and power it off every year.
Might want to switch it to a filesystem with a scrub function like zfs or btrfs, so you can read everything and find out of the data got messed up at the same time.
If you actually care about that data, this whole plan doesn’t sound optimal though.
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Move the data onto something designed for cold storage? If it isn’t a great deal of data, you could probably pickup some old models of LTO tapes for cheap and put the data on tape
Probably better off with spinning rust or those non rotting blue-rays.
And a bit of redundancy and check-summing still would not hurt.
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I’d take the optical media over HDD, those still suffer from needing the data read every so often, less so than SSDs tho
On the other hand you gotta make sure you get the ones that don’t rot which is apparently a bit of a minefield cause people sell the rotting ones as non rotting ones.
If you wanna keep data it needs redundancy and active maintenance, a few spinning rust drives with a btrfs/zfs pool on the that you scrub and maybe re-write every couple years should do it. Having redundancy is also gonna massively improve the survival if you forget the re-reads for a while.
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