As part of my big backup, I decided to gather up all the hard drives sitting in my closet, sort them by how old they are, and then reshuffle all my backups so the oldest backups use the oldest drives. The old backups are good to have, but if I'm gonna lose one to a hardware issue, best it be an old drive.

I'm kinda glad I did it, because it turns out the drive that originally held my 2017-2019 backups went bad AFTER I pulled stuff off it. Originally, I encrypted that drive with BitLocker, and apparently removing BitLocker on the drive trashed the way the drive is set up. Any write access hung Windows, and Linux just wouldn't even find the drive. I couldn't fix the issue with a low-level format, so that drive is toast.

Secondly, I have a whole extra hard drive I didn't know about, which is 6TB of blank space. That's at least 4 years of future backups there, so I should be good until 2029 for new drives. :)

Also, I think it's hilarious that my 2006-2008 backups all fit on 250GB while 2018-2020 filled a 4TB drive.