Historically, I first used a Synology Diskstation NAS (DS620) with 6 bays and 6 x 1TB data center grade HDDs to keep secondary copies of photos and self-recorde

Historically, I first used a Synology Diskstation NAS (DS620) with 6 bays and 6 x 1TB data center grade HDDs to keep secondary copies of photos and self-recorded videos (I don't have an urge to archive any commercial movies, as I could just buy them again if they got lost). The Synology GUI sits on top of a Linux variant and is easy to use and worked well, and is maintaned reasonably well (I don't use most of its functionality, you could run your intranet on it but if that's what you like, I'd recommend you buy two of them and separate concerns). After that I decided to migrate as much of my hardware as possible to 19" racks. So next, I upgraded to a Synology NAS RS819 (4-bay, 4x4 HDD = 16 TB raw capacity, 12 TB in a RAID5 setup). This lasts for quite some time, as I'm not much into movies. Importantly, the NAS is normally physically _not_ connected to any networks except when I transfer a new batch of photos for archiving. Some historic material is on a DAT tape in a fireproof safe but that is close to its expected end of life, which is fine as there are HDD copies. To view the photos, I access a subset of commonly viewed media on another 19" server, so the NAS is truly for archival use only. What would be nice, but is not yet implemented is a second site to add redundancy and protection from disasters (of course a backup should be offsite per definition). The two sites could synchronize over rsync. But I am still too concerned of the attack surface when putting archival machines on a network. A solution could be the following: some friends recommend Google's "cold storage" as a tertiary cloud storage, which is affordable, and they use scripts to encrypt their data; I think that is a good idea. The question regarding mechanisms to manage things in case of one's death is an excellent point raised by the poster - I bet a lot of valuable information assets have already been lost due to people passing away when their relatives are not IT savvy to rescue them (or the deceased didn't take precautions to leave passwords and instructions behind).