Hard Disk Monitoring

First, I apologize, I have mental retardation, and recently I started facing memory loss on top of it, hence my recent worry and need to preserve my memories stored in HDDs. Thus, my comprehension is affected. please forgive the annoyance that it is caused by me. 1- Does All Disk -> Surface test rea...

I have several external hard drives, and they are not connected. and I want to prevent bit rot and check the health of the drives. 1- is the Extended Self-Test just full SMART Scan? 2- for an HDD, I know I have to Refresh the Data on the HDD every year. so does running the Extended Self-Test enough?...