Digitizing your photos and tapes solves the "the original is decaying" problem — but it quietly creates a new one, because a single hard drive full of irreplaceable files is just a different kind of single point of failure.
What 3-2-1 actually means
- 3 copies of every file.
- 2 different types of storage — say, a hard drive and a cloud account.
- 1 copy off-site — a relative's house, a safe-deposit box, or a second cloud account.
A setup that takes an afternoon
Keep the working copy on your computer, sync a full copy to a cloud account, and keep a third copy on an external drive you store somewhere other than your house. Check the drive once a year; drives that sit unpowered for a decade don't always wake up.
Why bother
It sounds like overkill for family photos until the drive that held the only copy of Grandma's wedding video stops spinning up one day. Every file we deliver is worth protecting the same way you'd protect the originals.