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I am confused. The 100-GB Blu-ray disks that you buy cost about $20, which is much more expensive per GB than the cost of a 2.5" external drive. This is without counting the cost of your Blu-ray drive, the hassle of keeping around many more disks than hard drives (20 of your disks for a single 2 TB drive, for example), or the much lower read/write speed of the Blu-ray. And if portability is not an issue, you can get an even cheaper 3.5" external disk.

As a consumer, for archiving, I use M-Disc in quad-layer Blu-Ray, which is 100 Gb per disc. Verbatim makes the discs I buy, and the drive was less than $100.

--It's not very popular these days, but you could buy a Blu-Ray M-disc burner and a pack of 16x25GB M-Disc Blu-Rays for archival storage(think "stone media") for under $180, and burn ~375GB (uncompressed) onto 16 Blu-Ray DVDs...

--Actually I just checked and it looks like you can now buy 100GB M-disc blu-rays, albeit for a higher cost (and it may not be the same reliable stone-based media with scratch-resistant coating, according to 1 review I read.)

--About a year ago, I did a serious appraisal of all the data I *really* had to put under a "NEVERLOSE" label; and across all my PCs and laptops, it was under 25GB. Most of that was my CD music rips collection. You don't have to keep EVERYthing if you prioritize a little. Most of the other stuff is VMs and copies of things that are available on $something-else in the house.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

http://www.mdisc.com/

Archival Blu-rays Disclaimer - I know the patent holders.

Even a single copy on M-DISC in a media-grade fire resistant safe is more likely to survive the next 35 years intact and readable than the alternatives. Cloud, hard disk arrays, tapes, whatever. The total maintenance cost over this time is dramatically lower than the alternatives, too (virtually zero).

And I would not worry about availability of readers in 35 years. I don't see passive physical media completely going away. Passive media carrier that does not include electronics. There will always be a niche for that. The drives you will buy in 30 years are likely accept the same 12cm disc form we have been using for the last 35 years and be backward compatible with CD, DVD, Blu-ray, Violet-ray, UV-ray, Gen1 holographic, Gen2 quantum, Gen4 quarkstore and Gen4 planckstore disks :-)

I'll endorse the M-Disc thing. I have one myself, and like it for exactly this type of thing, like my wedding photos. I need to be more paranoid, and get more of my stuff on it, but the really REALLY important stuff is. Link: http://www.mdisc.com/

That's been solved: http://www.mdisc.com/

We finally have a media designed to last.

Almost. If you're serious about archiving low volumes of data, use these: http://www.mdisc.com/what-is-mdisc/

The can be read in standard BD and DVD players, and the drives aren't expensive. I picked up a DVD-R one for under $100, and a pack of disks for $45.

Then I found I have so little data that I want to preserve for a long time, I've never bought a second pack of disks. :-)

Put the video on a blue-ray disc, a DVD, and a CD

There were studies done years ago showing how optical media degrades over time. And they ere done when the idea of optical media was new. Now imagine extrapolating that 100 years.

Commercial media quality is often less than archival quality media...

You should check out the folks at M-DISC. They claim that the inorganic recording layer in their archival write-once Blu-Ray discs can survive ISO standards testing procedures that give it an estimated lifetime over 100 years (in standard storage conditions).

Recording MPEG2 redundantly on a few of these discs stored in a waterproof container, it should be reasonable to expect a 100 year life times (as much as any other media you might find out there)....

Asking myself the same question, I went with MDisc technology, in the BluRay capacity, in addition to my hard drive backups. MDisc uses an inorganic pigment as opposed to the organic dyes that are common on CD/DVD/BluRay recordables (and degrade over time).

I'll do an MDisc burn every year and move it offsite, to keep with the 4TB ZFS drive I rotate offsite weekly. The MDisc won't get my mp3 or mp4 files, but the stuff I can't recreate.

My best idea currently is to write PAR files of loop-back mounted LUKS volumes and include the PAR software source and ISO of the distro on the disc, in case I need the data in 20 years (emulators should be readily available for 2015 hardware).

I needed a BluRay writer anyway, so I went with this LG and it's been a great drive so far, and at the right price point for me.

I'm not the first and probably not the last to suggest you take a look at M-DISC. http://www.mdisc.com/. Also, with any optical disc storage you want to make sure to store them vertically. Gravity can do surprising things when given enough time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk

Horizontal and flat is how you want to store them. Gravity can't bend something on a flat surface. Vertical discs can bow, etc.

I'm not the first and probably not the last to suggest you take a look at M-DISC. http://www.mdisc.com/. Also, with any optical disc storage you want to make sure to store them vertically. Gravity can do surprising things when given enough time.

I use M-Disk. It is a DVD disk that is made of basically indestructible material. It is certified by the DoD as a medium of over 1000 years lifespan. Here is the link. http://www.mdisc.com/

I've been wondering about these for several years, seen a lot of PR but nothing that seemed like an unbiased recommendation yet:

http://www.mdisc.com/millennia...

As far as long term media, we have mdisc. Whether or not we'll have anything that can read the intact medium is another issue.

It's sad how we're still able to print from photographic plates shot a century ago, but I'm worrying about bit rot on my digital pics stored for 5 years.

A blu-ray M-Disc is now available. Put them in a fire safe (e.g. this one.

Even with just a single copy, I think this has a better chance of surviving the next 25 years than assuming that you will never fail to copy the data to the next hard disks before the old ones die over that entire period. Or that the cloud storage provider you choose will not go out of business.

And you should be able to find readers for this. For some applications there is good reason to have some kind of storage medium that is completely passive and has no electronics as part of it. And unless something changes in the laws of physics it will probably be optical. While they may shrink is size over time, for archival use a 12cm disc seems like a convenient form factor, doesn't it? So I think these holographic nanodispersion dense wavelength multiplexing diffraction-limit beating wonders will still be be backward compatible with the ancient "blue ray" format.

Not all physical (optical) media is devoted to entertainment; there are plenty of folks who have yet to be sold on "the cloud" for whatever reason but who still worry about bitrot and the ability to access content relatively quickly. Case in point, one of my immediate family members is a photography buff who has a large library of scanned negatives dating back to the 30s and he's been eyeing M-Discs for a while now. Still too expensive for regular use but like many amateur archivists, he's playing a long game.

Hopefully they will be using something similar to the M-Disc technology to make this archival format more reliable. Organic dyes don't seem to have quite enough staying power (though I just went through some 10-15 year old CD-Rs the other day and they were still readable).

I've yet to find a single media solution that has stood the test of time.

http://www.mdisc.com/what-is-mdisc/

This is a product that is shipping right now.
The discs are still expensive like BD-Rs when they first came out, but with only the capacity of a DVD-R.

You might try to backing up with http://www.mdisc.com/what-is-mdisc/ I've been using them since they came out and all my backups still work. It is supposed to last a thousand years. I don't know about that, but they do seem to be better than backing up to regular dvd which I have had go bad in as little as a year.

M-DISC:
DVD format presently, BLU-RAY format in the future. Someday an electronic eye will just be able to look at the disc surface and see it all in one snapshot.

They aim for 1000 years. I expect 100. It may be reasonable. Just keep drives around.

http://www.mdisc.com/proving-ground/

Take a look at M-Disc. You'll need an M-Disc compatible burner, and the discs are more expensive, but the data is safe for up to 1,000 years. It's literally etched in stone. What is M-Disc?

M-Disc claims closer to 1000 years. As it uses a mineral system instead of dyes.
In a fire, all DVDs use a polycarbonate material which wouldn't hold up as well as paper. For example it might become too fragile to spin in a drive after being exposed to heat for a prolong period. On the otherhand you could probably bury one in the ground and have it last closer to the 1000 years they claim, as polycarbonate isn't generally considered easily biodegrabable.

agreed http://www.mdisc.com/what-is-mdisc/ it looks bad-ass, lasts 1000 years, can withstand extreme heat, humidity, and light, tested by the DOD, and readable by normal dvd drives.