What’s the Best Long Term Storage Media? Tips to Avoid Losing Data in Your Lifetime

Valuable advice and thank you for explaining in easy way.

M-Disc. Plus a copy of important documents in plain old ASCII text in addition to original both stored on the M-Disc.

Pops old punch cards from the 60's are still good.

Some of my data is stored on hard drivers formated with FAT16, it can be hard to find machines that still read it. My windows XP machine still support it so I can still acess it, but when I upgrade my computer, maybe It won't read it anymore.

There was a company I think it was called Simpletech they sold a bio degradable Hard drive. I was like yah not the thing I want to think of as bio degradable.

I ran into problems with old PowerPoint file formats.

DVD LIFESPAN STILL DEPENDS ON YOUR STORAGE CAPABILITIES. ALSO A LOT OF TIMES OUR DVDS ARE JUST GATHERING DUSTS BUT JUST WIPE IT OFF AND STILL WORKS!

It's anecdotal, but I have had some surprising experiences with VERY old EPROMs (batch sizes of a few dozen chips). Mid 1980s chips that were flashed once with firmware and simply used in various pieces of equipment have shown 0 bad/altered bits. Checksums today are what they should be (no two EPROMs are different from each other), and data integrity is unbelievably good (compared to source data from original non-EPROM media, which was rotated through backups continuously over decades).

Pretty much none of the other common OLD media I've handled (open reel magnetic tape or cartridge, magnetic floppy disks of various sizes, hard disk platters, etc.) have demonstrated comparable reliability. The only other thing I'd swear by is punch card or paper tape. But that, and EPROM, have lousy data density. With card and tape, at least you can actually inspect the data integrity with your own eyes. Lol.

Not saying this is a solid answer. But the underlying technology is not THAT far removed from NAND flash. Yes, it is different. But original EPROM architecture was not intended to be a long-term storage solution. Erasability (via UV photoelectric mechanism) was the real selling point. Instead, there are proposed mechanisms where unaltered/unerased EPROMs may actually become harder to erase over time, increasing data integrity (written bits sort-of become electrically "entrenched"). It's somewhat counter-intuitive. But the lack of moving parts, and the relative immunity to external phenomena (i.e. magnetic fields, background radiation/cosmic rays, etc.) suggests this may pan out. TBD I guess.

Another matter not mentioned: filesystems have changed over the years. Linux does a real good job keeping support for older filesystems around for many years. Apple will introduce a new filesystem and then drop support for older ones. This becomes an issue when trying to copy your oldest drives - the modern host must be able to read it. An option is to use ISO9660, that hasn't changed since the 1990s and support is expected to continue for the foreseeable future.

One of the things that I do is to generate md5 checksums for the files that I've stored, and I will periodically verify the checksums. when a disk started to fail some files failed to checksum correctly so I was able to retired that computer (it was in-home webserver), but my data is backed up (I have duplicates on other disk drives and 2 unique sets of DVDs storing the same data). Having worked at a company that did backup software back in the 1990s, I know horror stories that customers encountered that got them to get a commercial product.

SSD: Price matters a lot when it comes to lifetime/durability. Also most people arnt aware that Server/NAS SSD exist with othe double or triple lifetime expected. I mean you go out & buy the cheapest no-name brand out there & it will "only" have a endurance of 80-120 TBW but if you spend a few bucks more & get a good brand like Samsung Evo or WD or ex-Intel you suddenly have a 300-600 TBW & if you spend a couple of bucks more & get like a server version like a Samsung 893 ssd you suddenly have 1700 TBW. Also beware that size matters so if a 1TB ssd 300TBW then a 2TB ssd usually has 600TBW. I personally think ssd's has reached a point where you should worry more about cheap components breaking down inside than the lifetime expetancy as a normal consumer . I mean the DWPD has reached a point where you can competely fill a whole 1TB ssd 2-3 times a day for 5 years straight before it starts breaking & most normal consumers probablt dont write more than 100GB a day tops.

I have been using 2 external hard drives I backup up to and a usb flash drive for important documents and records incase of a disaster I can grab and go.

I have lost data due to inadvertantly removing a storage drive before the "OK to eject" message, using obsolete file formats, and simply naming a file in an unfindable way🤔

Paper is always readable. The old Carbon Sheet Storage.

Memorex archive quality CD's. I have my copy of Windows 95 OSR 2.1b backed up on one and its still 100% fidelity going on 28 years later.

Nothing can be guaranteed.... I have seen entire homes burned down.
Having said that,I personally am betting on high end SSDs and refreshing them every 5- 7 years.

I started back in the mid-90s with 3.5 diskettes. I think at my peak I had like 100 diskettes with games and naked celebrity photos. I don't recall what came next, but I believe it was blank CDs, then somewhere along the way tape cartridges and those were pretty bad even if they had high storage capacity, then DVD, then finally moved all my stuff to Blu-ray blank discs.

Let me tell you, I've had Blu-ray discs for probably over 10 years and I wasn't very picky of the brand. I would buy cheap stacks and I would also pay for better quality ones like imation. The end result, after 10 years or more of storage, most of my Blu-Rays were becoming unreadable, especially the cheap trash, but also some imation blu-rays.

I have since moved my stuff to big hard drives. I plan to get a new hard drive every so often and backup my stuff to it and keep doing that over time.

I did start trying the M-disc blu-rays, but this is when my other blu-rays started becoming unreadable so I quit using optical discs for storage and my blu-ray recorded died on me, doesn't read blu-rays, so I can't check how those M-discs are working, but it hasn't been 10, 15, or 20 years like my old stuff to really test the longevity of them.

If I had data that was extremely important I would get an LTO drive and put stuff on tape. Multiple copies in multiple places of course. Expensive yes, but also very reliable. For me the issue of hard drives is that they are designed to be running, not sitting on a shelf. They can and do fail by just sitting there.

Thank you. I printed all my artwork then laminated it then put it in 3 rolling file boxes but I make tons of art every day. I have so many usb flash drives. It's ridiculous. I retired them all and got 2 128 gig Corsairs and a 128 gig micro sd. Windows doesn't like me using hubs. They want it all to themselves. No thanks. Anyway, I have been preserving by getting new usb's and getting my art off the old ones before they die or something. I save me art as png because it's light on the internet. I know I should save as something else like jpg, but I don't know what. I bought one of these new small external hard drives. 2 terabyte. Everything leaked out, even right in front of my eyes, so I was glad I'd saved to all those usb's. what do you suggest for digital art instead of . png?

Entropy, baby!

Is there a risk of data loss when migrating?

NASA's old data tapes are a good example of when storage goes wrong -they had the data tapes but not the machines that could read them when they needed the data on them, because they had been replaced by more modern equipment years ago. Lucky for them some guy still had some old equipment in his garage.

In the last 4 decades, Banks, Insurance, Finance Companies and Governments have used digital tape to archive their data. Spinning rust is a short term affair.

Digital hoarder

Cold storage needs to be off, disconnected harddrives. That doesn't make sense calling it "cold".

Even original, written in factory, silver dvds deteriorate. They can look in perfect state and are unreadable at all. Be aware.

Very thorough.

swap out hard drives every 8 to 10 years

well i still use dvd's my uncle has 20+ years old cd's and they still work so yeah.

M-Disc should last a millennium.

I have long ago migrated my dearest files to a NAS with a RAID-5 5-disk arrays as HDD prices have come down so much now that they are very affordable to have this kind of home setup.

I have kind of a more nuanced view on this--how good a storage can you afford, the media may last a long time but what about the drives, and how long is a long time for you? I was for a long time a hobbyist photographer and religiously backed up to Blu-Ray. Fore any time period I would look at it was reliable but small storage capacity discs easily damaged counted against it, plus optical media on it's way out. In the decade before that I was into magneto-optical which does last for a long time, but same story, fell out of favor. Tape is just too expensive, so I began backing up to a drive tower of mechanical disks, doing my work on SSD's, and from the tower make two offline hard drive copies, both stored in plastic padded caddies placed into old 50 caliber ammo cans--6 fit perfectly per can. One pair I store at a relative's place for safekeeping. That's as best as I can do on my budget. I sort of did online backup with Google Photos, but the cost, time to upload, and some very real concerns what they were doing with my photos. Sure, some places say they don't look at your data, but still, you're depending on a company and the network. If you're a big enterprise and can afford volume storage and need fast recovery, great. For mere mortals like me a well organized series of hard drives works fine.

I still had some 25 year old IDE HDDs. I picked up an inexpensive IDE to USB enclosure and migrated everything I wanted to keep to a 4Tb USB HDD. In another 25 years I'll migrate everything important off of it to the lastest 500Tb USB HDD. That's how I've always held on to my old data.

1: Papyrus paper with carbon charcoal and plant base resin inks

2: stone tablets

3: electronic capacitors when they get old on the electronic hard drive will go bad, but they can be fixed and replaced to make it work again.

The other alternative, the motor can be replaced. The drive can be replaced, or the disks can be removed and put onto a new or good hard drive motor and reader, if the old circuitboard Electronics degrade too much. .

Ransomware is a big threat to consider. This is why you should really consider nothing less than the 3-2-1 backup rule (google it if you are unfamiliar). Anything less than the 3-2-1 and you might as well not care about your data.

You want long term storage? Print your files out on acid-free paper. The existence of the wayback system is all you need to understand the limitations of digital storage.

omg I keep noticing the lip smacking between phrases (>_>)

I recommend an all of the above strategy. Another problem with of hard drives and flash drives is the firmware and controller chips can degrade. The data might be fine on the hard drive plates but if the chips fail on the HDD, it's as good as dead. I'd include Bluray Disc BDRs for infrequent backups of small data sets.

As a collector of vintage computers, I have extensive experience with aging consumer grade hard drives. No, the magnetic image doesn't begin to fade. Rather, the bearings seize on the disc spindles. Or the head stepper motor seizes because the lubricant dries out. Or the rubber bumpers inside get brittle. Or the head sticks to the platter. Or any number of other failure modes. In any case, hard drives from the early 1980s and newer are becoming unreadable, and these drives have been stored in conditions that are dry and relatively temperature stable. Of course, the jury is still out on SSD's so we'll know the answer to that in 2060. The answer is not just to back up, but back up with redundancy.

This is a thought that I have kept coming back to throughout the years as I think back to how technology and storage media have changed precipitously even within the last decade. Thank you for addressing them and I’ve pretty much come to the same conclusion… diverse mediums and multiple backups are the only insurance policy. We don’t often think about catastrophic events that lead to data loss but it’s always within the realm of possibility. 😬

One free option is to open a special e-mail account. A paragraph or two can be written to add some dimension to the photographs which can be added as an attachment. Then go to that account and archive the e-mail.

I'm blown away that in just 25 years, we went from floppy disk, to CD rom, to thumb drive. Floppy and CD are just about completely gone.

Just print everything out in hard copy!😂

ZFS boys and girls, ZFS. A nice RaidZ3 setup with auto snapshotting, and auto backup of snapshots to a backup server, that is powered up once a month to take those backups, with that server being powered down the rest of the time. You're pretty golden.

Carved stone,

One thing you didn't mention in this video is RAID for the hard drives to make the storage more reliable.

important data that is stored long term needs to have a replacement schedule and multiple copies. having different media just means having multiple schedules.
having a replacement schedule also means that you can do things like update the file format.

So well done.

Copy to the 'new' media, and keep the previous format.

Rinse and repeat.