What is the best media for long term archival storage?

For photos or documents like wills I think the best long term storage solution is still physical prints in a shoebox. Yes, they'll fade slowly over time, but will still be viewable for decades, or even centuries if printed using pigment inks on archival papers.

Of course there's still a chance that physical prints can be lost, stolen or destroyed in a house fire. But I think overall that's statistically much less likely to happen than digital media becoming obsolete or unreadable, or data stored online being deleted because the original uploader stopped paying the storage bill or didn't arrange for transfer of their accounts after their death.

Stone tablets are the only media I know of that lasts 1000s of years.

In all seriousness, this isn't a popular opinion around here, but cloud storage. I back my photos up to both iCloud and OneDrive. This way there is triple redundancy if you include the local copy. I trust Apple and Microsoft a lot more than myself to protect my data from spilled beverages, floods, fires, other acts of god, or just my own stupidity in general.

I’ve been considering this for over 5 years.

So far, cutting edge commercial is https://www.piql.com/, the Norwegian company that did the GitHub Arctic code vault. Their tapes have instructions on how to decode the data inscribed on the tape itself.

Truly cutting edge (non-commercial) is Microsoft’s Project Silica optical storage as well as DNA storage.

I’ve been thinking about building something in this space since I started my career, but the business seems incredibly hard to figure out a revenue model for. Trying to have someone pay up front for eternity(?), always seemed like a steep price. Would love to hear others thoughts if they’ve talked to people about this.

I would place my bets on:

CD-R because it is still around after more than two decades and the media is still in production, there are many drives and they are repairable.

My second choice would be DVD-R for similar reasons, but less history.

Third choice would be FAT formatted spinning disks used as write once. But they are much more susceptible to environmental flux.

Anything that is expensive or hard to come by or new, I would avoid…they’re almost certainly going to be a Zip drive equivalent in 20 years because there is no consumer demand for physical storage and less and less commercial demand because of the cloud.

But that’s me so YMMV. Good luck.

I've been through 8mm Exabyte tape, 4mm DAT tape, Sony AIT tape, and a couple of generations of LTO. I kept a pair of drives for each format, all using SCSI, and had suitable SCSI adaptors to drive them, and formated the recorded data using standard Open Source software with no compression or encryption. Every year, I'd read each tape, just to re-tension it, and try to avoid print-through, etc.

It was a massive effort. So, I no longer do that.

I now just keep everything on my NAS. The volumes are mirrored. I have a removable HDD onto which I snapshot the entire NAS volume every night. I swap that drive out every month and send it off-site (and replace it with the one previously off-site). So I have live, local snapshot (up to 24 hours out-of-date), and off-site snapshot (up to 1 month out of date).

Everything I care about is rsync-ed daily to the NAS: home directories, photos, music, Time Machine laptop backups, machine configs, IMAP sync, CalDAV sync, CardDAV, Git repo clones, etc.

Every few years, I double the size of the NAS volume.

There's no monthly cost, and there's no concern about degradation of the media. The storage format is always current, as are the OS and tools required to read it. The only effort is the monthly off-site drive swap.

It won't outlive me, unless my heirs decide to continue to maintain it, but ... at that point I no longer care.

MDisc DVDs and Bluray discs are supposed to last for a thousand years.

https://www.mdisc.com/

I’ve been thinking of this question too, and think a combination of cloud storage (GDrive + iCloud), HDs, and these MDiscs is what I’ll do. Just haven’t bought the MDrive writer yet.

I use AWS Glacier Deep Archive for exactly this, a few TB of photos, documents, etc.

RClone takes care of uploading to it. Works out to barely over $1/TB/month and AWS takes care of the media lifetime and all that.

I didn't bother with burned disks because then the backups are too local to me, nevermind spanking TBs across multiple disks.

Stone Tablets and large fonts have withstood the test of time. Low memory density however.

It really depends on your requirements.

In Film acá TV things get archived to LTO. The tapes last a long time and aren't that expensive. The writer/reader can be though (start around a few thousand bucks IIRC)

There are various exotic things but you probably won't find working readers for them in the future. I would go with M-disc or a NAS that's continuously maintained.

I've heard good old magnetic tapes (LTO nowadays) are the medium of choice for long-term storage within large organizations.

I only backup my synced icloud photos library on Mac to rsync.net using their borg services.

LTO tape