Ask Slashdot: Best Medium For Personal Archive?

An anonymous reader writes What would be the best media to store a backup of important files in a lockbox? Like a lot of people we have a lot of important information on our computers, and have a lot of files that we don't want backed up in the cloud, but want to preserve. Everything from our personally ripped media, family pictures, important documents, etc.. We are considering BluRay, HDD, and SSD but wanted to ask the Slashdot community what they would do. So, in 2015, what technology (or technologies!) would you employ to best ensure your data's long-term survival? Where would you put that lockbox?

Comments

External Harddrive

[painandgreed]

Every year, I just back up my files to an external hard drive and put it in my safety deposit box in the bank. If my house burns down, I still have all my photos (long since scanned in all my old film stuff), documents, and even music. I've got the last several years in there so it would take three or so drives not working to really lose everything (after I lost everything at home). Usually I spend a little extra money to make sure I have small external hard drives that don't have wall worts to power them as they'll fit in the safety deposit box easier and I won't have to keep track of the wall worts either. In the past, I suggested my parents do the same with a flash drive and my father scoffed when I mentioned keeping on in the safety deposit box. Of course, his computer got hit with the encryption malware and they lost everything including the flash drive we back up everything several years earlier because they can't remember where it might be.

Re:External Harddrive

[Anonymous Coward]

the problem with SAFE deposit boxes is that the renter of said box almost always has no contingency plan in place for access to that box when they die due to security restrictions on access that limit it to the renter only (and then only upon presentation of key, signature, identification, and perhaps a secret code and/or biometrics).

Pair of external HD's

[Maxwell]

You copy your hard drive every 3 months, but didn't recopy your optical disks for 15 years. And to you, this is 'proof' that HDD are superior?! OK, got it. I suggest reburn every 5 years on optical. You get a fresh disk and a chance to consolidate CD to DVD, DVD to BD etc.

Re:stone tablets

[vtcodger]

I looked into the reliability of CDs a decade or two ago. The consensus back then was that the lifetime of writable CDs (as opposed to the plastic disks with mechanically stamped pits) was unknown, but probably somewhere in range of a few years to a few decades. Worse, to avoid royalty issues, every CD maker used a different proprietary dye layer with different characteristics. Back then, it was far from a sure thing that a CD written on one drive could be read back reliably on a different drive even before the disk aged for a few years.

I'm not saying that CDs aren't suitable for storage, just that one probably ought to do some research about longevity before committing to their use as an archiving medium.

Really, same's probably true of any media other than punched cards.