I’m looking for a trustful method for offline (external) storage. I used to save stuff in 4 GB DVDs because they are cheap, although have very small storage limit for nowadays standards.
If I go for external HDDs, I’ll probably have to buy a NAS or something, so I’m considering go for DVDs again. Are they considered reasonably trustful?
Any suggestions, considering I’m look for a not very expensive solution?
If i remember correctly HDDs have a lifespan of about 50 years, while SSDs only 10. So I’d suggest you to buy an HDD
HDDs also offer an order of magnitude more storage dollar for dollar. I personally buy WD Elements/Easy Store drives, pull them from their external enclosure, and install them in my PC as network storage. I have about 8 of them now with as much as 5 years of 24/7 power on hours and haven’t had any issues.
If you all you care about is TB/$ you still cannot beat tape as long as you are using enough tapes.
It really depends how much you are talking about
Magnetic media are still the best for offline backup. A good tape drive, or hard drives if tape is not your cup of tea. If you don’t want a NAS, you can get a hot-swap SATA drive bay that allows plugging one drive into your computer at a time.
Recordable optical discs are a bit of a gamble for long term storage. Sometimes they last for ages, and sometimes they don’t. There are some made for “archival” purposes, but those are generally expensive and as far as I know not exactly well proven. Another drawback is that you need a lot of discs, all of which will eventually become plastic waste.
Don’t use flash drives for offline backup. Their charge decays when left unpowered, and your data with it.
Whatever medium you choose, be sure to make more than one copy, in case one of them fails.
I also have dvds that I use as storage sometimes. There are also m.2 nvme ssds and even USB drives that you can find for cheap. I still have many memory storage that I’ve had for a while. I’m not exactly sure if you are planning on having this storage always accessible, but I don’t see an issue with DVDs. You can still fit a lot on 4 GB DVD and if you need something bigger there are a lot of cheap SanDisk generic USB drives you can get at like a Walmart.