2 ms·
Ask HN: Long term data archiving for Individuals?
I've spent many hours trying to find the best physical medium for long term (30+ years) archiving on individual budget.
External HDDs: good option, but lots of moving parts and could die if in storage for a decade.
SSD & SDcard: both start losing charge if not powered after ~5 years.
Tape (LTO) trouble with gen9, issues with drive-tape backwards compatibility, rather expensive.
Blu-ray: archival grade Panasonic is great but impossible to buy in Europe. M-disc is expensive. I have doubts of drive availability in the future.
Cloud: not for archiving; imagine trouble paying the rent because a transtacion fails leading to destroy your archives.
Any other options I'm unaware of?
- enz 7y agoI don’t think anything can beat LTO here. The only problem is the price of the controller... I worked in the TV industry a few years ago, and LTOs were (and still is) the only viable archiving technology for heavy 1080p (or 4K, now) videos.