Whats the best way to archive data long term while on a budget ?
I just need to preserve some old data that I have on my computers, so I was wondering what would be the best way to archive stuff long term.
Blu-ray disks ? Multiple HDDs ? What do you guys suggest ?
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
Are those... cheap? They don't look cheap.
Nope
About £90 for 4 discs, and £30 for the writer, gets you 400Gb storage.
I bought a (nearly) 1Tb thumb drive for £10 last week and copied all my music onto it. I’m thinking of getting a few more for docs and other media and leaving them in my keysafe.
Generally speaking obscure formats are not great for long term storage for your chances to read it again years later.
You can read those with a regular blu ray drive. No special hard- or software needed.
By the time blu ray started becoming popular optical media were basically dead already as a data storage medium so those aren't particular common either.
The only reason blu ray still exists is that you can't buy (as in: own) movies in a high quality format otherwise.
If the publishers got the sticks out of their arses and offered file downloads for purchase, I wouldn't see a single reason to buy a physical disk other than sentimentalism.
And that is movie blu ray, data blu ray formats never really got off the ground.