I’m old enough that we used floppy and then CD/DVD drives for storage, and then flash drives and external hard drives. But I recently was told those aren’t good long term storage options (ex: family photos or sensitive documents). Why are they poor options for long term storage, and what should be used instead?
In: Technology
I like the [M-Disc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC) Blu-Ray media. These don’t use dyes so they don’t fade and you can fit 25 GB on each disc. Actually they have multi-layer discs up to 100 GB but they’re disproportionately expensive and I don’t trust more than one layer on optical media. Yes, this is fiddly and not cheap but I think it’s the safest choice for home archival purposes.
My second choice is just USB external spinning drives. These are cheap enough to buy every year or two and copy your data on to them. Personally I’d stay away from the models using shingled writes and especially helium but that’s getting harder and costs more per byte.
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