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Leomund's secret chest is a spell that lets the caster hide a very expensive chest in the Ethereal Plane. However, its drawback is that after 60 days, there is a chance the spell ends. If the spell ends while the chest is in the Ethereal Plane, it's lost forever.
My question is, where does the 60 day counter start? Is it from the moment of casting, so that you need to re-cast the spell every 60 days? Or do you just need to recall the chest every 60 days to check on its contents?
The relevant paragraph from Secret Chest (which is Leomund’s Secret Chest without the Leomund) is
After 60 days, there is a cumulative 5 percent chance per day that the spell's effect ends. This effect ends if you cast this spell again, if the smaller replica chest is destroyed, or if you choose to end the spell as an action. If the spell ends and the larger chest is on the Ethereal Plane, it is irretrievably lost.
This paragraph mentions no condition for the cumulative daily failure chance, so it is unconditional. The simple fix for this is to regularly recall your chest and cast the spell again and making sure you keep your chest on the material plane if you expect that you won’t be able to cast spells, have access to your replica or have any spare 4th level spell slots for a long period of time (although such circumstances should be rare enough that it may never come up in any campaign you play in, but it’s worth keeping in mind if you decide to travel to other planes like the Feywild that may have a different concept of time); Keep in mind that the spell doesn’t consume its expensive material components so it only costs you another 4th level spell slot to do so.
