8 ms·

What is the best consumer friendly long-term storage medium? Are we still better off with high capacity dvd/Blu ray discs?

1970-01-01 7mo ago
I've been a big fan of M-Disc BD-R.
BoredPositron 7mo ago
What's long-term? I have some dvd-rs that push 20-25 years and despite the plastic getting brittle they still work. I also have some ide drives that still work without problems after 40 years. I would rather aim for 20 years and upgrade the storage device if I still need to retain the data.
- vel0city 7mo ago
  That's a thought I hadn't had. The plastic of the disk getting so brittle it shatters in the drive due to age. I wonder what's the embrittlement profile of polycarbonate stored in reasonable condition.
  - mrob 7mo ago
    I've personally never noticed brittleness in old optical discs (unlike the polystyrene jewel cases, which often turn brittle). I don't think shattering is likely, but if it's a concern some optical drives allow limiting the maximum spin speed. If the drive supports it you can temporarily set it with the -x option of the "eject" command from util-linux.
  - mapontosevenths 7mo ago
    Brittleness is not a concern. "Disk rot" is. The dyes used to make writable DVD's were organic (AZO usually), and break down starting at around the 17 year mark (some earlier, if they were poorly made). They have some measure of redundancy built-in, so you may not notice right away. The discs begin to look a bit "cloudy" at first. Eventually they become unreadable. Go with inorganic blu ray media if you want longevity. Most HTL blu rays made currently will last around 100 years if properly stored. If you need longer there are M-Disc's, but they are expensive and rumor has it that ALL verbatim 100Gb blu rays are essentially M-Discs with different labels these days. For all practical purposes any Blu ray larger than 25Gb is probably inorganic HTL, but if you worry a lot you can buy more expensive "archival grade" discs from Japan as well that have been vettted and tested.
orthogonal_cube 7mo ago
Probably depends on what “consumer-friendly” entails, how it’s stored, and the quantity of data. If we’re talking the average tech-illiterate to literate-but-cost-and-space-constrained person, probably Blu-Ray. A burner+reader combo with a stack of dual-layer discs is probably cost-effective. High-capacity HDDs would probably be equally effective if you can guarantee that they’re stored away from accidents and mishandling, but if it requires a SATA-to-USB adapter with assembly then it might possibly be out of reach for some consumers, and any risk of damage from movement could rule it out entirely. If we’re talking tech-savvy consumers who don’t have the IT budget of a corporation, maybe LTO-5 or LTO-6 tapes could work. Tapes themselves are very affordable and have a good shelf lifespan. Used libraries can be had for under $600. The primary issues would be finding one with an interface that works with your existing equipment and software to support tape read and write.
layer8 7mo ago
Honestly: multiple copies of encrypted cloud storage. (Encryption just for privacy.) You need decentralized backups anyway. Alternatively, two NAS systems with some RAID variation in different locations that back up each other can be more cost-effective for large capacities.
- foxglacier 7mo ago
  You're talking about backups which you wouldn't normally need to keep for decades and will be powered on regularly anyway. If it's archival, such as family photos for your kids when they grow up, cloud storage can lose them if you die or go to prison or for whatever reason don't keep paying the bill.
  - layer8 7mo ago
    If you go to prison, you can lose whatever media you have as well. I wouldn't rely on a single cloud storage provider, but mirror on multiple ones, and mirror on one or more local device as well, at least for the most important data. I wouldn't use physical media as primary backup copies today: long-term durability, and availability & support of matching peripherals are uncertain, and they don't make proper backups with redundancy easier, nor their verifiability. For the kids, I'd rather make physical photo albums.
    - foxglacier 7mo ago
      If there's so little data that you can fit it in photo albums, this is all moot because you can literally just store them in printed form on paper which will easily last a lifetime. Flash is what you might be tempted to use for 10s-100s if GB, including videos.
bityard 7mo ago
Recordable blu-ray discs have a reported lifespan of hundreds of years if left untouched, but the high-capacity ones (128GB) are not especially cheap right now and I assume the writing process is slow. The drives themselves may not be easy to come by in future decades. But they are your best bet for "I want my data to outlive my grandchildren." For the rest of us, a USB spinning rust hard drive formatted as exFAT is going to be hard to beat. You'll be able to plug this into virtually any computer made in the next few decades (modulo a USB adapter or two) and just read it. They are cheap (even allowing for the rising cost of storage), fast, and most importantly, they are easy. The data is stored magnetically, so is not susceptible to degradation just from sitting like SSDs or flash drives are. Of course, you should not store any important data on only ONE drive. The 3-2-1 backup rule applies to archives as well: 3 copies, 2 different media, 1 off-site.
- fy20 7mo ago
  I decided to go with NTFS for the filesystem as it has journaling. Works fine on Linux, and obviously Windows. For macOS there are various add-ons that support NTFS, but my use case there is read-only.
- Marsymars 7mo ago
  I recently went through this exercise and settled on HFS+ over exFAT. Reliability seems a bit better with some edge cases, and I don’t expect I’ll be put into a situation where I’m not able to read HFS+ drives. (Though probably not appropriate if you’re primarily not a mac user, or won’t be in the future.)
  - Krutonium 7mo ago
    You're assuming Apple is going to continue even supporting HFS+ long term. They already convert volumes to APFS opportunistically.
    - Marsymars 7mo ago
      APFS is generally not appropriate for HDDs, so yeah, I expect they'll keep supporting HFS+ for as long as they keep supporting non-flash storage. In any case, if the situation changes, I expect there'll be enough lead time for me to adjust my strategy -- the failure scenario is completely different than rotting physical media.
msy 7mo ago
Consumer? Apple or Google Photos or 'drive' functionality of either. The only real risk then is losing your account and Apple Photos has an option to keep them all locally on disk.
- curt15 7mo ago
  To be pedantic, the post you responded to asked about "storage medium", not storage services, which leads to the question of what storage medium they use and how long the services will be around.
myself248 7mo ago
Paper. Not even kidding. With any other media, you have to hope that the drives are still available. Paper routinely lasts hundreds of years and we all have readers built right in.
- vaylian 7mo ago
  I like simple solutions. But paper has severe storage capacity limitations, which makes it impractical for storing large amounts of data.
  - Multicomp 7mo ago
    that's one of my AI shower thoughts, an improved version of https://www.ollydbg.de/Paperbak/ https://www.ollydbg.de/Paperbak/ s basic idea: write compressed computer data to barcode (1d), QR code (2d), multi-color barcode ('3'd), and so on. But I keep hoping someone will finish the 'use lasers to burn 5d storage into glass chips' project silica concept and bring it to market so I can have isolinear star trek chips.
josh3736 7mo ago
It does really depend on how much data you want to store, but if you've got a lot of it… Tape. Obviously extreme prosumer, but for long-term archival of lots of data, LTO tape wins in several ways: - Discs just aren't actually that high capacity relative to modern HDD capacities. BD XL maxes out at 128 GB, while there are now 30 TB HDDs readily available. That's 240 discs per HDD. Modern LTO tapes store 12-18 TB, or 2-3 tapes per HDD. - Anything flash-based is a bad choice for long-term storage. SSDs are very fast, but also (relatively) expensive at 15-20¢/GB. Reputable SD cards are in the same neighborhood. Despite the OP redditor's results here, flash is only expected to retain data for 5-10 years. - Tape is the absolute lowest cost-per-GB you can find of any storage medium. At the moment, LTO 8/9 tape can be had on Amazon for ½¢/GB. Compare with BD-R at 2¢/GB, or BR-R XL M-disc at 15¢/GB. HDDs (spinning rust) are 2-3¢/GB. - Consider also write speed. LTO can write 300+ MB/s. BD 16x maxes out around 68 MB/s. - Manufacturers rate tapes for 30 years sitting on a shelf, and it wouldn't be surprising if they still read after 50 years¹. Plain BD-R lasts 5-20 years. M-disc is the interesting outlier, rated 100-1000 years. Of course, the biggest problem with tape is the drives. While the media is dirt cheap, the drives are crazy expensive. It looks like you can pick up a used LTO-6 drive (2.5 TB tapes) on ebay for around $500. A brand new LTO-9 drive (18 TB tapes) will be $4000-5000. In terms of breakeven points, a used LTO-6 drive + tapes beats plain BD after about 25 TB. Because of the cost of M-discs, they stop making sense after 1-2 TB. Purely on cost, a brand new LTO-9 drive + tapes doesn't beat used LTO-6 + tapes until about 800 TB (LTO-9 tape is ½¢/GB while LTO-6 tape is 1¢/GB), but there's definitely a point in there where the larger capacity of LTO-9 makes dealing with the physical media a whole lot easier. So if you're looking for long-term storage for your photo album, a M-disc BD XL is probably a good choice. If you only have a few hundred GB of data, a couple discs + burner can be had for $300 or so, and you can be pretty sure your mom could manage to read the disc if necessary. But if you're looking to back up your 100 TB homelab NAS, discs are not really feasible. You'll have to spend the next month swapping discs every 25 minutes², and then deal with your new thousand disc collection. Here's where a used LTO-6 drive makes a lot of sense. This is a real sweet spot if you can find a decent drive; all-in you'd spend about $1500 to back up your 100 TB. This is what I do to backup my NAS — found an old LTO-6 drive and got a bunch of tapes. The drive plugs in to a SAS port (you might need a HBA PCI card, $50), and that's pretty much it. Linux has the drivers built in; it will show up as /dev/st0 and you can just point tar³ at it. Finally, just to compare with cloud options, storing that 100 TB in AWS Glacier Deep Archive would run you slightly over $100/mo, so you're ahead with your own tapes after little over a year. Oh and don't forget to set aside an extra $8000 for data transfer fees should you ever actually want to retrieve your data lol. --- ¹ eg the Unix v4 tape that was recently found and successfully read after 52 years — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45840321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45840321 ² Or get a disc-swapping robot, but those run $4000-5000, at which point… you're better off with a brand new tape drive. ³ Thus using the Tape ARchiver program for its original purpose. Use -M to span tapes, tar will prompt you to swap.
Piraty 7mo ago
https://blog.dshr.org/2025/03/archival-storage.html https://blog.dshr.org/2025/03/archival-storage.html
izacus 7mo ago
There are long term storage type BR discs built for durability (M-Discs from one brand for example).

1970-01-01 7mo ago

I've been a big fan of M-Disc BD-R.

BoredPositron 7mo ago

What's long-term? I have some dvd-rs that push 20-25 years and despite the plastic getting brittle they still work. I also have some ide drives that still work without problems after 40 years. I would rather aim for 20 years and upgrade the storage device if I still need to retain the data.

vel0city 7mo ago
That's a thought I hadn't had. The plastic of the disk getting so brittle it shatters in the drive due to age. I wonder what's the embrittlement profile of polycarbonate stored in reasonable condition.
- mrob 7mo ago
  I've personally never noticed brittleness in old optical discs (unlike the polystyrene jewel cases, which often turn brittle). I don't think shattering is likely, but if it's a concern some optical drives allow limiting the maximum spin speed. If the drive supports it you can temporarily set it with the -x option of the "eject" command from util-linux.
- mapontosevenths 7mo ago
  Brittleness is not a concern. "Disk rot" is. The dyes used to make writable DVD's were organic (AZO usually), and break down starting at around the 17 year mark (some earlier, if they were poorly made). They have some measure of redundancy built-in, so you may not notice right away. The discs begin to look a bit "cloudy" at first. Eventually they become unreadable. Go with inorganic blu ray media if you want longevity. Most HTL blu rays made currently will last around 100 years if properly stored. If you need longer there are M-Disc's, but they are expensive and rumor has it that ALL verbatim 100Gb blu rays are essentially M-Discs with different labels these days. For all practical purposes any Blu ray larger than 25Gb is probably inorganic HTL, but if you worry a lot you can buy more expensive "archival grade" discs from Japan as well that have been vettted and tested.

orthogonal_cube 7mo ago

Probably depends on what “consumer-friendly” entails, how it’s stored, and the quantity of data. If we’re talking the average tech-illiterate to literate-but-cost-and-space-constrained person, probably Blu-Ray. A burner+reader combo with a stack of dual-layer discs is probably cost-effective. High-capacity HDDs would probably be equally effective if you can guarantee that they’re stored away from accidents and mishandling, but if it requires a SATA-to-USB adapter with assembly then it might possibly be out of reach for some consumers, and any risk of damage from movement could rule it out entirely. If we’re talking tech-savvy consumers who don’t have the IT budget of a corporation, maybe LTO-5 or LTO-6 tapes could work. Tapes themselves are very affordable and have a good shelf lifespan. Used libraries can be had for under $600. The primary issues would be finding one with an interface that works with your existing equipment and software to support tape read and write.

layer8 7mo ago

Honestly: multiple copies of encrypted cloud storage. (Encryption just for privacy.) You need decentralized backups anyway. Alternatively, two NAS systems with some RAID variation in different locations that back up each other can be more cost-effective for large capacities.

foxglacier 7mo ago
You're talking about backups which you wouldn't normally need to keep for decades and will be powered on regularly anyway. If it's archival, such as family photos for your kids when they grow up, cloud storage can lose them if you die or go to prison or for whatever reason don't keep paying the bill.
- layer8 7mo ago
  If you go to prison, you can lose whatever media you have as well. I wouldn't rely on a single cloud storage provider, but mirror on multiple ones, and mirror on one or more local device as well, at least for the most important data. I wouldn't use physical media as primary backup copies today: long-term durability, and availability & support of matching peripherals are uncertain, and they don't make proper backups with redundancy easier, nor their verifiability. For the kids, I'd rather make physical photo albums.
  - foxglacier 7mo ago
    If there's so little data that you can fit it in photo albums, this is all moot because you can literally just store them in printed form on paper which will easily last a lifetime. Flash is what you might be tempted to use for 10s-100s if GB, including videos.

bityard 7mo ago

Recordable blu-ray discs have a reported lifespan of hundreds of years if left untouched, but the high-capacity ones (128GB) are not especially cheap right now and I assume the writing process is slow. The drives themselves may not be easy to come by in future decades. But they are your best bet for "I want my data to outlive my grandchildren." For the rest of us, a USB spinning rust hard drive formatted as exFAT is going to be hard to beat. You'll be able to plug this into virtually any computer made in the next few decades (modulo a USB adapter or two) and just read it. They are cheap (even allowing for the rising cost of storage), fast, and most importantly, they are easy. The data is stored magnetically, so is not susceptible to degradation just from sitting like SSDs or flash drives are. Of course, you should not store any important data on only ONE drive. The 3-2-1 backup rule applies to archives as well: 3 copies, 2 different media, 1 off-site.

fy20 7mo ago
I decided to go with NTFS for the filesystem as it has journaling. Works fine on Linux, and obviously Windows. For macOS there are various add-ons that support NTFS, but my use case there is read-only.
Marsymars 7mo ago
I recently went through this exercise and settled on HFS+ over exFAT. Reliability seems a bit better with some edge cases, and I don’t expect I’ll be put into a situation where I’m not able to read HFS+ drives. (Though probably not appropriate if you’re primarily not a mac user, or won’t be in the future.)
- Krutonium 7mo ago
  You're assuming Apple is going to continue even supporting HFS+ long term. They already convert volumes to APFS opportunistically.
  - Marsymars 7mo ago
    APFS is generally not appropriate for HDDs, so yeah, I expect they'll keep supporting HFS+ for as long as they keep supporting non-flash storage. In any case, if the situation changes, I expect there'll be enough lead time for me to adjust my strategy -- the failure scenario is completely different than rotting physical media.

msy 7mo ago

Consumer? Apple or Google Photos or 'drive' functionality of either. The only real risk then is losing your account and Apple Photos has an option to keep them all locally on disk.

curt15 7mo ago
To be pedantic, the post you responded to asked about "storage medium", not storage services, which leads to the question of what storage medium they use and how long the services will be around.

myself248 7mo ago

Paper. Not even kidding. With any other media, you have to hope that the drives are still available. Paper routinely lasts hundreds of years and we all have readers built right in.

vaylian 7mo ago
I like simple solutions. But paper has severe storage capacity limitations, which makes it impractical for storing large amounts of data.
- Multicomp 7mo ago
  that's one of my AI shower thoughts, an improved version of https://www.ollydbg.de/Paperbak/ https://www.ollydbg.de/Paperbak/ s basic idea: write compressed computer data to barcode (1d), QR code (2d), multi-color barcode ('3'd), and so on. But I keep hoping someone will finish the 'use lasers to burn 5d storage into glass chips' project silica concept and bring it to market so I can have isolinear star trek chips.

josh3736 7mo ago

It does really depend on how much data you want to store, but if you've got a lot of it… Tape. Obviously extreme prosumer, but for long-term archival of lots of data, LTO tape wins in several ways: - Discs just aren't actually that high capacity relative to modern HDD capacities. BD XL maxes out at 128 GB, while there are now 30 TB HDDs readily available. That's 240 discs per HDD. Modern LTO tapes store 12-18 TB, or 2-3 tapes per HDD. - Anything flash-based is a bad choice for long-term storage. SSDs are very fast, but also (relatively) expensive at 15-20¢/GB. Reputable SD cards are in the same neighborhood. Despite the OP redditor's results here, flash is only expected to retain data for 5-10 years. - Tape is the absolute lowest cost-per-GB you can find of any storage medium. At the moment, LTO 8/9 tape can be had on Amazon for ½¢/GB. Compare with BD-R at 2¢/GB, or BR-R XL M-disc at 15¢/GB. HDDs (spinning rust) are 2-3¢/GB. - Consider also write speed. LTO can write 300+ MB/s. BD 16x maxes out around 68 MB/s. - Manufacturers rate tapes for 30 years sitting on a shelf, and it wouldn't be surprising if they still read after 50 years¹. Plain BD-R lasts 5-20 years. M-disc is the interesting outlier, rated 100-1000 years. Of course, the biggest problem with tape is the drives. While the media is dirt cheap, the drives are crazy expensive. It looks like you can pick up a used LTO-6 drive (2.5 TB tapes) on ebay for around $500. A brand new LTO-9 drive (18 TB tapes) will be $4000-5000. In terms of breakeven points, a used LTO-6 drive + tapes beats plain BD after about 25 TB. Because of the cost of M-discs, they stop making sense after 1-2 TB. Purely on cost, a brand new LTO-9 drive + tapes doesn't beat used LTO-6 + tapes until about 800 TB (LTO-9 tape is ½¢/GB while LTO-6 tape is 1¢/GB), but there's definitely a point in there where the larger capacity of LTO-9 makes dealing with the physical media a whole lot easier. So if you're looking for long-term storage for your photo album, a M-disc BD XL is probably a good choice. If you only have a few hundred GB of data, a couple discs + burner can be had for $300 or so, and you can be pretty sure your mom could manage to read the disc if necessary. But if you're looking to back up your 100 TB homelab NAS, discs are not really feasible. You'll have to spend the next month swapping discs every 25 minutes², and then deal with your new thousand disc collection. Here's where a used LTO-6 drive makes a lot of sense. This is a real sweet spot if you can find a decent drive; all-in you'd spend about $1500 to back up your 100 TB. This is what I do to backup my NAS — found an old LTO-6 drive and got a bunch of tapes. The drive plugs in to a SAS port (you might need a HBA PCI card, $50), and that's pretty much it. Linux has the drivers built in; it will show up as /dev/st0 and you can just point tar³ at it. Finally, just to compare with cloud options, storing that 100 TB in AWS Glacier Deep Archive would run you slightly over $100/mo, so you're ahead with your own tapes after little over a year. Oh and don't forget to set aside an extra $8000 for data transfer fees should you ever actually want to retrieve your data lol. --- ¹ eg the Unix v4 tape that was recently found and successfully read after 52 years — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45840321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45840321 ² Or get a disc-swapping robot, but those run $4000-5000, at which point… you're better off with a brand new tape drive. ³ Thus using the Tape ARchiver program for its original purpose. Use -M to span tapes, tar will prompt you to swap.

Piraty 7mo ago

https://blog.dshr.org/2025/03/archival-storage.html https://blog.dshr.org/2025/03/archival-storage.html

izacus 7mo ago

There are long term storage type BR discs built for durability (M-Discs from one brand for example).