Portable hard drives will also go bad as well. I keep 2 backups of my important data, and in fact, I recently had a 4gb HD that just died after about 3 years, I've just backed it up to a newer drive.
Mark
That is.very excellent advice. One thing I want to do in retirement is scan all the deteriorating family photo albums—some of the pix are over 100 years old. Sounds like I’d better do some research on media shelf life.