I recently looked at an old USB key that had some JPGs stored from ~5 years ago.
I was astonished to see that over 50% of the photos had some sort of bit rot that broke the JPG rendering. Many photos would display correctly at the top until the row where the damage occurs and then display grey for the remainder.
This definitely occurs more than you would think on USB keys.
You could generate parity files to guard against this. There was some discussion recently here about tools to do it. One example that is decent is https://github.com/brenthuisman/par2deep
I was astonished to see that over 50% of the photos had some sort of bit rot that broke the JPG rendering. Many photos would display correctly at the top until the row where the damage occurs and then display grey for the remainder.
This definitely occurs more than you would think on USB keys.