I'm no lawyer, so I'm not sure about this. But what if the game/data is clearly incriminated (e.g. containing illegal pornography)? Could a judge in theory force gog to reveal the downloaders and confiscate your hardware? That's very speculative of course, but never say never ;)

@UnashamedWeeb
Thanks for the hint. Fixed the missing letter.

Not a lawyer, but I think they'd theoretically be able to under a subpoena depending on the jurisdictions to get a list of customer info. Then the courts would have to authorize confiscating your PC before doing so.

In reality if GOG did somehow sell illegal materials in a game, they'd quickly take it down, remove it from the store and everyone's library (also to protect those people from possessing such materials), and urge them to remove them if they somehow backed it up. I would also expect a refund from this too if they cannot work with the devpub to remove such materials from their game.

But the chances of such an event would be very small that I wouldn't consider in everyday decisionmaking.

It is certainly not just a few years. Unless you are unlucky ... hence the reason for having multiple backup drives and copies. Even new drives can die suddenly for no apparent reason.

I have many drives that exceed that 10 years that amok mentions.

I don't think there is any hard and fast rules, and so it could be just down to how good the drive is in the first place and how often you use it, and your type of usage.

The idea for me, is that you do minimal erasure and mostly reading and writing.
You also never copy too much data at once ... never let it heat up very much. This is especially true for thousands of small files, which will tax your drive big time.
Where you physically store them is also important, as well as how gentle they are handled.
And limit the amount of connect & disconnect during periods of use.
Treat your drives kindly and they might last you a very long time.

My backup drives are limited to game files, and in a few cases, music files. I only store game installers too, not game folders with lots of files. All that limits their usage.

Most studies done on hard drives, are done in a manner that I consider abuse or where those drives are being used a lot.

Cloud storage has its limitations, especially amount of data, and how long it can take to transfer. Just not an option for me on both accounts. But then I have a lot of games, just at GOG. GOG while they last are my cloud storage ... if not the most ideal, because changes can and do occur.

Thats becuase these numbers are averages, it is a bell curve. some HDD's will be on the left of the curve, some will be on the right. And as said, it also depends on how much you use them. The number I said is the average life expectency of a magnetic HDD