What media should I use for long term archives?

If you are creating cds or dvd's for archival purposes, purchase archival quality media. They should last a good bit longer than the standard media.

For additional info, see http://adterrasperaspera.com/blog/2006/10/30/how-to-choose-cddvd-archival-media

--Dave

I've had a recent problem with a CD that was burnt with a photo archive of mine back in 2003-4. When I went to read, extract something off the disk, guess what, it wouldn't read properly. I managed to use a retrieval program and reclaim about 80% of what was on the disk. I'm not sure if this problem was due to something during the burn process or whether the dye was deteriorating already. Either way, I've now purchased an external HD back-up as well as reburnt a few archive disks.

Media are much more vulnerable in tropical climate. Here in Brazil, floppies always tended to fade away within days - sometimes hours.
CDs so far show to be more resistent. But, attention, CD Rom work fine after years, CD RW (rewrite) may deteriorate within a few months. They start to show trails like the ones of termites in wood and do not work anymore.
Harddrives only pose problems where they are constantly hooked to energy: Blackouts may destroy them. Non-hooked-up harddrives may - depending on quality - present fungal problems after a few months.

Depending on the size of the data to be stored, the best long term storage for the average user would be hard disks in terms of speed, size and the cost. I use several 500GB external drives, connected only when necessary, and have a test and re-copy schedule. However, for commercial purposes, I think optical/magneto-optical storage is much better. Reputable online storage companies could be another option and obselescence of the storage method wouldn't be a problem. For portable storage I've been using mini-HD's after I had problems with flash memories and CDRW's. Note that, although the CD/RW's and flash memories are supposed to be re-written hundreds of times, if the quality of the built in hardware programming that is supposed to prevent writing on the same location repeatedly is not good, a single data writing process may require file allocation table to be we-written many times and these areas of the media deteriorate very quickly. So I'd say go with the hard disks, at least for the time being and use other media only for temporary or short time storage.

when I worked in the server room at a certain company I learned to use archival media - gold media. it really depends on how the media is made and the dyes used, etc. as to how long they will last, how much light they will stand up to shelf life, and so on.
Gold media is rated for 300 years. silver thermal media is rated for 250, and they are more expensive than regular media. some prepackaged Mitsui MAM-A gold media come diamond-coated to resist scratches.
Hard disks are warrantied for only 5 years, but I have seen then last longer.
there are several outlets that sell Mitsui MAM-A media, one of them is mediasupply.com - they come in several forms, one of them in shrink-wrap (no cakebox). They sell in bulk too. I found decent cakeboxes that lock down nicely at meritline.com
silver thermal is $51/100 and gold is $110/100 I think. but the diamond-coated packaged gold is more expensive than that and it's really heavy and it's bulky of course.

Well, it looks like the old typwriter may make a comeback after all!

http://www.domdedomdom.com/

"In the long run, we are all dead." (Keynes) My long run is shorter than the large majority of computer users, and I often think "why archive data?" rather than "how?".

Yes, I managed to convert my pre-PC data to modern media and file types - but it's rare that I need a file more than a couple of years old. And I can't imagine anyone looking at all those digital photos after God closes my lid.

There's supposed to be an information explosion - let's not make it worse!

I can attest to hard drives going out in blackouts; and to think I almost knew it was going to happen.

So, that's how I found this place. I'm trying to find out how to boot from my USB drive, because I have nearly a gigabyte worth of RAM combined with the flash drive. 256 mb of USB drive, 1 256 mb card of RAM, 1 512 mb carf of RAM. They're old and slow.

Dad:Hey, son, you should turn off your desktop, the lightning storm might break it.
Me:K.
*5 minutes*
*bluescreen after a light power surge, but I noticed that the reason was legit-"something failure", not unlike the regular fakes[actual blue screen, fake reason, not something I can alt+tab out of]
*real power surge*
*turns computer back on*
"HARD DRIVE 0 FAIL"
"Crap."

I didn't wanna buy an enclosure to even test for data. I took it apart and airdusted it all. I threw away the hard drive.

On second thought, I could have put it back together once and tried again before throwing it away, but that's too late now.

[At this point in time, my screen had died. Almost exactly at the 5 year/6 year mark. Weird.]

NOW onto something relevant.

I do believe that USB will be around a long time. I have noticed that the old connectors for keyboards/mouses being phased out in favor of USB connectors[on the devices themselves!].

Hm.

This computer has a backup drive, I wonder if I can use it on my old computer...