Wow HDD's really are the new tape drives
but if you put them on a shelf, then the life is roughly the same :D
Careful, that's not always the case.
Anecdotally, I lost a few TB's of data recently after assuming my drives sitting on the shelf (inside anti-static bags) would be fine after only a couple of years. Plugging each drive in prompted the Windows popup asking if I wanted to initialize the drives! Total data loss on all 4 drives after only a couple of years on the shelf. It wasn't a big loss to me, because I couldn't even remember what data was on the drives... but I wouldn't rely on this for business data.
Tapes still have their purpose.
disks are also much more succeptible to vibrations than tape. the only thing is that maintaining tape expertise to pull data back into modern systems is a bit difficult
No, mechanically they all work fine... just no data on them anymore. I believe the partition table became corrupted, so Windows just thinks its a wiped/new drive and asks if you want to initialize it.
In my case, I said "No", and will attempt data recovery sometime when I'm bored (TestDisk[1] might just be able to restore the partition table, allowing me to extract data from the drives then perform a real wipe, otherwise a more serious data recovery tool like StellarPhoenix, GetDataBackNFTS or similar will be required).
> disks are also much more succeptible to vibrations than tape
They sure are. There are other factors too, such as radiation (from solar flares and more), temperature, and more that can cause "bit rot", even for a drive not in use.
> the only thing is that maintaining tape expertise to pull data back into modern systems is a bit difficult
Usually not so much. Whatever utility you used to create the backup tape almost assuredly has the ability to restore data from the tape. Some even are full disk images written to tape, which allows you to put a tape drive into a new system and restore the entire thing... while others only backup data to tape, etc.
[0] http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/
Data recovery will likely work, since they mechanically work and Windows does see them as drives, just no data (says uninitialized).
My initial thought was it's just the partition table that was corrupted, so something like TestDisk might easily restore the table and allow me to extract my data. Otherwise something more serious would be needed... at this point though, I can't remember what's on the drives, so my effort level is minimal.
My "total loss" statement was more along the lines of using hard disks for backups. Having a corrupted partition table from the drive sitting on a shelf isn't a good thing to rely on for backups. If it were business data, it would have been on tapes instead of disks.