Powered all the time on or powered off?

Rewriting the data each year hides the actual issue here. Have had plenty of "nice" flash drives rot to hell in 18+ months of dormancy

Slightly related: I have a tool that writes random (incompressible) data to a disk and lets you verify it back without storing a copy (by using a csprng seed), initially developed for benchmarking SSDs that used to cheat to get better performance numbers but that can also be used for this purpose or to overwrite (“shred”) a disk: https://github.com/mqudsi/hddrand

That's good. I want to keep some institutional knowledge and photos in "cold storage" and cloud subscriptions with a credit card and password are completely inviable.

I'll probably get a spinner and a flash drive and hope one of them survives the years.

What's the simplest way to rewrite the data without actually copying the data? Like in place rewrite - you write what you read.

I like the fact he's not just verifying all of them each year. AFAICR, reading the flash causes the row to be rewritten with the values just read.

I remember years ago working on the Wii, and there was a restriction on how often you could read the flash to avoid premature wearing. Not sure if that was just the specific type of storage, as googling suggests that NAND is subject to this and NOR isn't. I think pretty much all USB drives now use NOR flash, so maybe this isn't actually an issue any more.

What is the best consumer friendly long-term storage medium? Are we still better off with high capacity dvd/Blu ray discs?