My father told me he wanted to make USB flash drives of all the scanned and digitized family photos and other assorted letters and mementos. He planned to distribute them to all family members hoping that at least one set would survive. When I explained that they ought to be recipes to new media every N number of years or risk deteriorating or becoming unreadable (like a floppy disk when you have no floppy drive), he was genuinely shocked. He lost interest in the project that he’d thought was so bullet proof.
I’ve got several flash drives from 2 different brands that are less than 3 years old that are already dying. SanDisk and Lexar, both large brands and they’re already losing reliability. Real shame that the older stuff works longer. I really only need them for making Linux bootable drives and they struggle with that.