HACKER Q&A
📣 pmlnr

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 Accepted Answer ✓
I 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.