I’ve ordered yesterday an unused old external floppy-drive (IBM) and a set of floppies (Sony). More for fun than on purpose. By the way you need them everywhere where stuff remains a long time usable e.g. the older B747-400 or trains, plants and heavy machines and so on.
I hoped that SD-Cards replace them because the slip into a slot (other than USB-Thumbsdrives), have defined speed-classes and you can write on their outside what is stored on them. Cars, cameras, bike-computers and so on use them everywhere but computer manufacturers failed to built them in or connect them properly via USB (I refer especially to Lenovo which connected the card-slots via PCI which prevented booting from them…).
Honestly. I don’t like optical disks. They allowed for higher capacity but they were like multiple steps backward and a huge waste of material. Mostly one time writeable, a lot of material required, big form factor and writing them was also complex. Optical disks are like technology which should have skipped over? I even myself bought once a mini-disc player…wasted money.
Oh no, optical disk is superior - I can backup family photos to M-disk and shove it in a bank vault, and in 100 years it will still work.
Just like photos, I have family photos that are 60 years old. Digital photos of 10 years old are lost
How are you gonna store a video for 50 years? flash memory discharges, hard disks rust, upload to google drive and hope they don’t kill the service?
As far as I know flash memory should last at least ten years. After that period of time I would either copy the data, erase and write again or look for other tech. So this requires manual intervention.
Which other? Magnetic tapes are often used for this purpose. Microfilms shall be much better. Paper is really resilient.
I would avoid any cloud, Google has a bad track record. The online access and requirements make it unreliable. In best case the don’t try to search the data or delete it by accident. As they did already.
As far as I know CDs last only ten years. DVDs maybe 30 years. I’ve it is a -ROM it last likely 100 years. But therefore you need special equipment. The M-Discs you mention are new for me but this sounds good. Are regular drives guaranteed to read it?
The most problematic thing isn’t just keeping the data. We also need to be able to read it again. Maybe we need to use good old stones ^^