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Ask Slashdot: Best Long-Term Video/Picture Storage?
First time accepted submitter (and first-time parent — congratulations!) SoylentRed writes "I recently have had my first kid, a wonderful healthy daughter who is now just over 6 months old. As one can expect, we have an abundance of photos and videos, and have started to scratch our heads about the best way to store these files and back them up long-term. My parents have asked us (funny thing is it was my mom — the least tech-savvy person among our family) what our plan is to make sure these files are saved and available for her when she is older — which made me realize that we don't really have a good plan! We are currently using TimeMachine on my wife's MacBook Pro; for now we are doing OK with that as a back-up. But my parents have offered to help pay for something that might be a better solution. We could burn DVDs — but that is tedious and gets to be a pain as we would need to back those up (or recopy) them every year or so to be sure we aren't suffering from degrading DVDs. Is our best option right now to pick up two hard drives, back up all our pictures and videos to the first, and then use a 3rd party app to mirror that drive to the second just in case one of them craps out? Is there an online solution that would be better? We are still a few years away from being able to afford the DVDs/CDs that are the 100+ year discs. Is there a better solution I haven't thought of?"
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File and forget works with film. Digital archives are better if you do the work; analog archives are better if you don't. And over the decades, almost inevitably, someone forgets to do the work.
Without question. In 80 years, you're going to die. Your kids are going to come into your house, go through your stuff and try to figure out what to keep and what goes to the estate sale. No matter how carefully assembled and documented, no matter how well you lay out (now) your archival system and metadata linkage, when it comes down to picking through the bones of your life, it's going to look like a computer system (and probably an ancient, useless one at that). A shoebox full of pictures, especially with notes written on the back, has clear value in that context and will be saved for the next generation. Those same pictures assembled into an album, even more so.
Video...how do you think you're going to play all those h264 in 80 years, when your computer is a little sliver of plastic embedded in your thumb?