Most hard drives have a lifespan of three to five years. Have you checked yours lately?

Maybe you intend to sort through them, keeping the good stuff and discarding the chaff. But perhaps that exercise feels a bit boring and overwhelming, so it keeps being relegated to the endless tomorrow.

But regardless of whether you choose HDD or SSD, both have a limited life.

Of course, cloud providers also store data on drives but, as Guabtni points out, the difference is they typically rely on a very well-secured data centre where the environment is stable, the hardware is upgraded and constantly maintained, and your data is replicated multiple times making it harder to lose. Then the only concern is privacy.