
Ask HN: Long term data archiving for Individuals? - pmlnr
I&#x27;ve spent many hours trying to find the best physical medium for long term (30+ years) archiving on individual budget.<p>External HDDs: good option, but lots of moving parts and could die if in storage for a decade.<p>SSD &amp; SDcard: both start losing charge if not powered after ~5 years.<p>Tape (LTO) trouble with gen9, issues with drive-tape backwards compatibility, rather expensive.<p>Blu-ray: archival grade Panasonic is great but impossible to buy in Europe. M-disc is expensive. I have doubts of drive availability in the future.<p>Cloud: not for archiving; imagine trouble paying the rent because a transtacion fails leading to destroy your archives.<p>Any other options I&#x27;m unaware of?
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enz
I don’t think anything can beat LTO here. The only problem is the price of the
controller...

I worked in the TV industry a few years ago, and LTOs were (and still is) the
only viable archiving technology for heavy 1080p (or 4K, now) videos.

