In the 90s, used to be I burned docs & data to CDr media and put them in my bookshelf at home for long term archive. I can still read these CDs today, 30 yrs later. Success.<p>What is today's equivalent?<p>Hard drives make me nervous because they have moving parts. SSDs make me nervous because :shrug:. Tape backup seems like a hassle and expensive. I don't want cloud storage (e.g. amazon glacier or the like) because I don't want ongoing costs.<p>Are CDr still a thing? Am I being too anxious about HDs or SSDs?<p>Advice appreciated.
CDrs still are a thing, and may work "about as well".<p>The only surefire way for long term <i>archival</i> storage for the average user is to use multiple methods, and check them from time to time.<p>It's all a matter of cost vs how much you want to archive. If it's in the "CDr size" you can just make tons of copies, some will probably survive.<p>But you can also just keep that much around on every device you own and checksum it regularly.<p>Tape is pretty good, but even there you'd want multiple copies on different media. You could rent a drive or buy a used one, write out your tapes, and then sell the drive again.<p>Hard drives sitting unpowered have a "decent" change of firing back up after 10+ years, if you have the connector (externals are probably easiest) - but even there I'd want multiple copies from different vendors.
You could use M-DISCs, which look like traditional CDs nut are made for long-term storage and should be readable much longer than other CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays. The optical drives for burning M-DISCs are readily available and not very expensive.
If you're only looking to store a small amount of data then writable discs (CD, DVD, etc) are still easily available. Just make sure to keep them out of direct sunlight as that can affect their long-term readability.<p>If you need to store a larger volume of data then you'll probably be looking at tape of some form of hard disk/SSD.<p>Either way you can reduce the risk of loss by having a regular process of copying the old data to new media and keeping both the old and new media - that way if one copy of your data fails you'll still have other copies that you can use.
My current thinking.<p>CD's are the equivalent of CD's. Like you said, thirty years later they still work.<p>DVD's are probably close.<p>Spinning disks are probably ok if used as write once.<p>All of these have lots of compatible hardware and software.<p>Tape is great at scale. But you're not at scale.<p>The cloud is one declined credit card away from erasure.<p>Good luck.
BD-R writable DVDs seem to provide either 25GB (single layer) or 50GB (double layer) storage, and seem like they would have longer lifetime than spinning discs, SSDs, or tape. I guess if I can deal with 50GB chunks that may be the best option.
It looks like a RAID setup might remove your concern for moving parts, while benefiting from a cheaper storage price.<p>I had this concern myself and eventually I gave up and do it on cloud.