For me I had a stack dvd blanks left over, I decided to save a little bit of money and used them to back up folders of childhood photos, documents etc and place them inside their own jewel cases.
I do have a 2TB external HDD, But that I throw on LARGE steam game back ups and movies.
Sure, the “cloud” exists and I use that too but what if your intewebz goes down, good luck getting your backups until it’s back up.
What do you use? Optical media, tape drives etc?
10-15 years for DVD. I have extensive experience with DVDs. I don’t have experience with Blu-ray but I would expect it to be half the rated lifespan too.
I’ve got oodles of 20-25 year old DVDs and never found a dud. But it’s good to set expectations.
Burned DVD’s or mass manufactured? Purchased can last forever although aluminum substrate corrosion has happened in humid environments.
A few years ago I went through a 15-year-old collection of DVDs and a surprising number of the burned discs were no longer usable.
Size-wise I’d probably just get a handful of 256 gig USB sticks and make multiple copies keep them in a temperature and humidity controlled environment.
Get M-discs. It’s a special type of Blu-ray that lasts for hundrets if not thousands of years. You can use a regular Blu-ray burner to write to it.
I have absolutely no trust in those discs
They throw around the thousand year and 500 year and 5,000 year dates on the different brands
I’ve seen people report failures and some of the different brands of archival discs that claim the super long lifetimes.
Also keeping in mind that regular burnable DVDs are reported to have hundreds of years of lifetime I definitely have a great deal of those that failed that were burned in the early 2000s.
And there’s the fact that I would need 10 of them for my must-haves and probably 60 for my nice to haves
I really rather have it all on tape, there are tons of peer-reviewed studies on long time tape archiving. In every 7 years you can just read copy or set to freshen it up. but that s*** still too expensive.
USB sticks are only rated for 10 years. So you should only expect 5. Physically they will last much longer but the electrons leak out of the floating gate unless re-written.
