I used to back up for long term storage on floppies. The on iomega drives, later on CDs and then on DVDs. My thinking was that what's on my hard disk today is v

I used to back up for long term storage on floppies. The on iomega drives, later on CDs and then on DVDs. My thinking was that what's on my hard disk today is volatile and the backup media is for the long haul. In every case those became a problem over time either due to degradation of the media or simply because the underlying tech became more rare or unavailable. So about ten years ago I flipped my approach. My long term storage is my current file server and for the backups I have no expectation of them lasting more than a year or two but that's fine. The file server is up and running 24x7 so it is not bit-rotting in some drawer. It runs ZFS so integrity is guaranteed. ECC RAM. 4-way mirror for every pool so there's plenty of redundancy. The only drawback is having to stock it with enough storage to hold everything, but that's the tradeoff. Storage gets cheaper while backup media doesn't get particularly more reliable so it's a good tradeoff. I still do backups of course (while ZFS and ECC guarantee integrity, nothing guarantees I won't accidentaly rm a file) with zfs snapshot and send, but these are only for disaster recovery not archival so I don't need to lose sleep worrying how long they last.