Hard drives from the last 20 years are now slowly dying.
Not really. Disk took over when the clouds started offering cheap archiving. Tape is getting more and more rare.
Not for long term archival they didn’t. HDDs and SSDs suffer from bitrot among other issues when they haven’t been powered and/or refreshed in awhile.
Tape is still king for long term archival, just about every major company uses it for the long term archival of critical data.
They may also use cloud archival services, because when it comes to backups if you don’t have multiple across multiple mediums and multiple places, you don’t have a backup.
Tape suffers from bit rot too. Radiation doesn’t target just HDDs and SSDs. Look, I don’t know what to tell you. I deal with a lot of large companies and I lived through tape’s hayday. The cost to archive data on disk is not high and companies don’t have issues doing it. Having it on disk prevents bit rot, because the pools are massive and are auto-healing. Also, the only way that your archive is not going to be long term is if humaity ends. Seriously, what do you think it would take to destroy a multi-AZ glacier archive?
They aren’t talking about availability. This is about data integrity over time.