For long term archiving, the fundamental hard problem is the storage density, The further the storage unit size drifts below human scale the harder it is to long term archive.<p>I think for the average person, the best thing to do, for long term archives is to take advantage of sturgeons law, "90 percent of everything is crap". triage the things you want to archive to a minimum, then print them out, at human scale, on paper. have physical copies of the photos you want to keep, listings of the code you are proud of, correspondence that is dear to you.<p>This will last, with no intervention, a very long time. Because as is increasingly becoming obvious, once the format drifts below human scale the best way to preserve data is to manage the data separate from the medium it is stored on with a constant effort to move it to a current medium. where it easily evaporates once vigilance drifts.