One of the downsides of being a data hoarders is that eventually hard drives fail or are no longer usable (hello, all of you 2TB hard drives). Which means that along with having a strategy for backing up and preserving data, you need an end game for destroying the data.
Full disk encryption goes a long way toward ensuring data on older drives won’t be compromised, but what are the odds that if you took a hard drive offline today that 3 or 4 years from now there won’t have been at least one bug found in the encryption software you’re using that could lead an attack to access the plaintext?
When I’m done with a hard drive, I’m going to get it shredded. DataGuard USA operates a service called Ship ‘N’ Shred that you can ship hard drives to and for a reasonable fee they will shred the hard drives.
After shredding, they’ll provide you a certificate of destruction that is FACTA/HIPAA compliant if you like.
For less than $50, I can have a box of 20 hard drives shipped to them for destruction and, more importantly, peace of mind.