Quote:
I'm looking for something that can still be accessed after 50 years!
Think back 10 years. 2004. What storage options did you have? CD, or IDE hard drive. Your phone or iPad does not know what to do with that.
Think back 20 years. 1994. What storage options did you have. 1.44 floppy, and small hard drives. My current PC can talk to neither. Ok, the small HDD, but only with some work.
What will be using 10 years from now? SATA-E v2.0? 30 years from now? Who knows...
50 years from now? They will laugh at a measly 4TB HDD. "Greatgrandad...WTF is this thing?"
A home created DVD will
not last 50 years, nor will there be a system available to read it 50 years from now. Well...maybe in a museum.
Today, if I handed my kids a 1.44mb floppy disk (from 1998) with critical family info, they would have no idea what to do with it. And no one they know (except me) would either.
Applications + metadata? Applications come and go. And will NOT be usable a decade (or more) from now.
Go find an HTML 1.0 file or website. See how 'readable' it is on a current browser. Now fast forward to HTML 11.3.
The best way, moving forward, is to have multiple copies, and port it over to the 'newish' storage medium every year or two.
Floppy, CD, DVD, tape, hard drive, SSD, something new, something newer, etc, etc, etc.
AND have actual prints, on archival paper, stored in a cool, dry, dark space.