Forums

[whiteknight]

Recently at a men's group meeting, we were talking about what is the best media to save things in the long term. In the time I've used computers, I've seen floppies come and go, zip drives--same thing, and CD's will probably disappear soon and they don't last that long anyway.

It makes me wonder what is the best way to preserve photos, music and documents for the years to come? Burned CD's don't last that long, and it would take massive thumb drives to store all the photos I have. Currently I use a big portable storage drive, but even that will become outdated because operating systems change and are retired.

What do our forum moderators and readers think is the best long term storage media device to use? For the long term, say 10 years or more.

thanks for your responses...

[EasyGoin]

If you don't want to got the CD/DVD route, about the only viable option is currently magnetic media. Hard drives or tapes. Tape drives are expensive and have to be shifted off site. If you are really worried about ease of access and backward compatibility, then massed, redundant hard drives are the way to go with cloud or offsite backups done regularly. The only thing you need to do is keep up with technology as it changes.

If you're doing CDs/DVDs check out http://www.naa.gov.au/records-management/agency/preserve/physical-preservation/CDs-and-DVDs.aspx

[rhcsg]

I keep my media backed up on an external harddrive (also my music is currently backed up automatically on iCloud). Like EasyGoin said, I mainly just plan on keeping up with technology as it changes.