[fpgaminer]

I built a battery powered project designed to run continuously for ten years. Of all the things in that design, the I2C bus makes me the most nervous (1). Every time the MCU wakes up it has to use I2C to read from the RTC. If at any point in that ten year span the I2C bus gets jammed ...

I mitigated the issues by doing I2C resets on every read (see the Analog Devices I2C reset documentation linked in another comment) and reading multiple times to filter out any spurious bit errors.

Other than that I just have my fingers crossed that a bit doesn't accidentally flip and overwrite something in the RTC. Or that the bus somehow gets stuck driven between sleeps and drains the battery early. sigh SPI would have been so much nicer.

(1) I mean, okay, the massive lithium battery exploding is perhaps the most nerve racking component, but I2C is a close second.