I keep hearing people say that hard drives won’t last long and to always have backups. But if it is like that, that means you would have to be buying drives consistently? Has anyone ever had a hard drive work for them successfully for a decade or even more where they wouldn’t have to be buying more?
Yes. And I’ve had various drives die without warning, including SSDs, flash media, spinning rust. You never know when a power spike (or corruption, or bad luck, or a spilled drink or…) is going to come along and smoke your storage.