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I don't trust any consumer storage medium to last 30 years, but the good news is I have had much success keeping document archives accessible for roughly a deca

I don't trust any consumer storage medium to last 30 years, but the good news is I have had much success keeping document archives accessible for roughly a decade, then transferring the content to current technology. From floppy to mechanical hdd to cd-r to now ssd. Maybe consider something shorter term than 30 years, but with an upgrade path.

tkgally 4y ago
I’ve been doing something similar. After losing some important personal files back in the early 1990s due to floppies that failed, and hearing a lot of stories then about people losing data in hard disk crashes, I got paranoid about my personal archives and started backing them all up systematically and redundantly to the latest media (CD-R, DVD-R, etc.). My strategy changed, though, with the arrival of cloud storage. Now I have all of my files—about a terabyte and a half—synced to multiple computers through Dropbox, and I back up each of those computers to an offline hard disk every ten days or so. My main computer is also backed up continuously to an external hard disk. File formats are a different problem. Until around the end of the 1990s, I used a series of different word processor, spreadsheet, page layout, email, and other programs, all for the Macintosh, and I can no longer open a lot of those files. In more recent years, file formats seem to have become more stable, and I have tried to be careful to use formats that seem likely to survive as long as I will—docx, odt, mp3, pdf, jpeg, and especially txt.
- sumthinprofound 4y ago
  This sounds like a solid strategy. Most of my oldest documents were Wordperfect 5, so they were still readable. I have converted them to txt (accessibilty) and pdf (preserve formatting). My biggest miscalculations were using CD-RW media during a period of time in the early 2000s (the media often cannot be read by CD drives the disc was not created on) as well as my choice to use cheap CD-R media which over time the plastic became cloudy, or the reflective layer oxidizing and then flaking over time.

tkgally 4y ago

I’ve been doing something similar. After losing some important personal files back in the early 1990s due to floppies that failed, and hearing a lot of stories then about people losing data in hard disk crashes, I got paranoid about my personal archives and started backing them all up systematically and redundantly to the latest media (CD-R, DVD-R, etc.). My strategy changed, though, with the arrival of cloud storage. Now I have all of my files—about a terabyte and a half—synced to multiple computers through Dropbox, and I back up each of those computers to an offline hard disk every ten days or so. My main computer is also backed up continuously to an external hard disk. File formats are a different problem. Until around the end of the 1990s, I used a series of different word processor, spreadsheet, page layout, email, and other programs, all for the Macintosh, and I can no longer open a lot of those files. In more recent years, file formats seem to have become more stable, and I have tried to be careful to use formats that seem likely to survive as long as I will—docx, odt, mp3, pdf, jpeg, and especially txt.

sumthinprofound 4y ago
This sounds like a solid strategy. Most of my oldest documents were Wordperfect 5, so they were still readable. I have converted them to txt (accessibilty) and pdf (preserve formatting). My biggest miscalculations were using CD-RW media during a period of time in the early 2000s (the media often cannot be read by CD drives the disc was not created on) as well as my choice to use cheap CD-R media which over time the plastic became cloudy, or the reflective layer oxidizing and then flaking over time.