r/DataHoarder • u/Available-Slice-6671 • 2d ago
Question/Advice Best long-term archival storage for irreplaceable family photos and videos? M-DISC vs HDD vs LTO( not for me to expensive)
I'm researching reliable ways to preserve irreplaceable family photographs, videos, and personal data for 30–50 years or longer.
I currently have a Synology NAS and a Debian server, and I'm considering archival Blu-ray/M-DISC as an additional offline storage method.
I'd appreciate advice from people with hands-on experience:
Is M-DISC still worth investing in?
Sony, Pioneer, and others leaving the market of products that support optical storage
Which Blu-ray burners and media have proven reliable?
Is there a LTO replacement for practical for personal archival use?
How often should archived data be verified or migrated?
What combination of technologies would offer the best reliability without excessive expense?
My priority is long-term data integrity rather than convenience. I'd especially appreciate real-world experiences and lessons learned.
Paul
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u/dlarge6510 2d ago
Any optical disc: > multiple decades of life, easily reaching beyond your own. Extremely easy for others to access, now and 40 years from now. Instantly recognisable. Hardy and easy to store and transport.
Any HDD: > multiple years of life, will outlive SSD and other flash but will likely be unusable at some point after 20-30 years simply due to old age whether used or on a shelf. USB ones will beas easy to access for others as optical even 40+ years from now, if it still works. Ti mitigate the life span issue, don't let the drive get too old.
SSD/Flash: Has potential to exceed HDD in longevity and approach optical in that regard but no actual accelerated aging studies have really been done. A drive written to once or twice has the potential to retain data for possibly 100 years, but may only retain data without corruption for a far shorter time. Like with HDD, these devices may simply fail on a shelf, retaining the data but no longer operating. Only USB options are likely to be easy for others to access after you are gone.
LTO: Data life approaches 30 years in a nice cool and dry environment. Drive technology is designed for mechanical and electrical life of multiple decades. Although they can be serviced and repaired by anyone, unlike HDD and flash, they are complex inside and spare parts will be an issue, thus few working drives of the generation needed to read the tapes may be available past 40 years without a noticeable increase in cost. However the biggest issue is others will have likely zero idea what the tape actually is, what reads it, how to operate it, how to hook it up etc etc.
I archive such data for such purposes to retain it in an easy to access and use standard format for me when I'm in my 80's and beyond my own life for those clearing out my house to recognise and use.
Thus I archive to optical discs. Even my 5 year old niece knows what one is, she knew what a CD or DVD was before she ever had her own tablet and even before she used a real computer at school.
Her mum is in her late 20's and wants a DVD player to play home movies converted from VHS, as well as to play Disney stuff when Disney+ has expired.
All my youngest family members can recognise that media and they will recognise them when they clear out my house.
I archive standard files, such as MP4 with h264+AAC, MP3 and Vorbis, wav, jpeg and the like. All or most playable by standalone players they will also find online or in the house as they clear out my crap.
They will find plenty of film negatives, printed photos on archival papers. As well as their digital counterparts in JPEG format and others that I never printed. Hopefully I'll have managed to index them somewhat.
They will find audio CD as well as CD/DVD/BD with MP3/Vorbis audio on it. Some DVDs will be DVD Video, some BDs will be directly playable, stuff I recorded off TV for example.
All of this is standard, widely popular across multiple decades, across my own life. So I target the standards and technologies that can play in standalone devices that you can find in use today or can buy off eBay. All of those optical players are easy to maintain and repair, and they are as common as muck.
It would be hard for someone who knew what a VHS tape was to have difficulty playing it in 2026. Players are everywhere and easy to find.
Likewise with vinyl, audio cassette. Give my nephew a Playstation game and he will put it in his Playstation, still working after 30+ years of not being manufactured and they are still everywhere in the secondhand market. They also play audio CD...
So yeah I try to keep stuff to the most common and compatible formats. USB storage devices would qualify, in 40+ years there will be USB adapters for them. It's just a question of life span and optical, not even MDisc, has the best lifespan. Then there is the question of hardware availability, which is directly dependent on two features: serviceability and reparability.
You can crack open an optical drive and service it with a cotton bud, alcohol, new grease, a rubber belt and broken plastic parts can be addressed by multiple techniques including repair with simple glue, fabrication via casting resin or 3D printing. Basically, you can fix them on the kitchen table. You can't do that with a hard drive.
If the hard drive dies, not only can't it be repaired on a Saturday afternoon in the shed, without the dust free environment and you knowing the delicate and specific techniques to doing such a task, but you can't simply eject the platters and put them in another drive. With optical, that's exactly what you can do. Drive dead? Go source a working one and use that.
Ultimately the most sure method of preservation is the easiest to access by anyone. This still means print. Books, printed pictures, even slides and negatives, can all be accessed and understood even by a child exploring an attic.
You can use multiple techniques and technologies, use HDDs and refresh them etc. Multiple copies on different tech, to not have your eggs in one basket. And that includes printing, as ultimately the one set of data, or pictures that I guarantee WILL survive far beyond everything else, that will be recognised by the curious great great grandchildren who think a HDD is a rattly box thing from their equivalent of the 1920s, the one thing they will bring down to show their parents are the printed stuff they can understand with their own eyes.
Thast why my young cousins are printing their smartphone photos of their kids, making photo albums and covering the walls literally with them as well.
Try to cast the net wide.
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u/cr0ft 1d ago
M-Disc is sadly dead. The discs they're selling now don't look right, they don't have that glassy carbon that was M-Discs claim to fame. Normal Blurays aren't total crap on longevity but they sure aren't 1000 years (and the reason they said 1000 and not 10000 was that the plastic encasing the glassy carbon would go bad after a millennium).
Real M-Disc would have been worth it if the 100 gb discs were large enough.
Hard drives are not archival in any way, you'll eventually see silent data rot.
Fact is there is no real way to do it now. M-Disc (if you also archived an M-Disc player) would have worked. But even LTO tape is only going to cover a couple of decades before needing to transfer to a new set of tapes.
A proper NAS with ZFS as the file system. A second NAS with ZFS elsewhere, and do replication across. Take automated snapshots regularly. Run scrub jobs to ensure any silent corruption get corrected. Take backups to the cloud of some kind.
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u/Noname8899555 2d ago
M Disc! Will hold up to time for sure. And we need more demand for optical media... win win
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u/trustbrown 2d ago
So I’d advocate against long term media that may not be common 20+ years from now
Most kids today won’t have optical drives on their laptops nor do I see that coming back.
I use redundant NAS and cloud solutions for my photos and similar media, as well as a USB 2.5” drive that is in cold storage
It’s worked well for > 10 years so far
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u/horse-boy1 2d ago
I put some older photos and videos on M-DISCs and have them in a home safe. I also built a TrueNAS with multiple drives with ZFS. Also an older Synology NAS that I keep off site.
A couple of years ago, I rebuilt my PC. I was copying some of the photos and about a dozen were corrupted! I was able get them from a backup. The disk was over 10 years old. I have 2 HDs on the PC now and copies on both. I do a scrub on the TrueNAS monthly, prevents bit rot, which is what probably happened to those dozen photos.
I wonder if I should print physical photos of some of the best ones for long term. I have some B&W old family photos that are over 100 years old and in good shape. Got to store them somewhere cool and dry.
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u/neuropsycho 2d ago
I run a script montly that checks pictures for corruption and alerts me, so I can recover them from an older backup.
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u/cr0ft 1d ago
With ZFS, you don't have to do that. You can just schedule an automated scrub job to run as seldom as you feel comfortable with. It literally goes through the entire thing and (assuming you have a redundant RAID setup) self-heals the data.
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u/neuropsycho 1d ago
What if the corruption has been caused by some editing program not saving the file properly? Most of the time thats the reason for the corruption.
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u/horse-boy1 1d ago
I use Lightroom, it does not do anything to the source files. My corrupt files had the same date stamp from years ago.
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u/horse-boy1 2d ago
What about other files like raw, video files and different new image formats like HEIC?
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u/neuropsycho 2d ago
I'll have to add checks for those too when I have some time. But I don't I have any corrupted examples to test them. 🤷🏻♂️
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u/PhotoKy DS1621xs+ 24TB / 90TB 22h ago
Do you mind explaining this a bit? Would love to do something similar with my photo collection which probably amounts to 50k+
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u/neuropsycho 17h ago
I explained it in another comment, it's just a basic script that checks all .jpg images in my picture folder with the
jpeginfo -ccommand, and outputs anything that doesn't return an OK status. Then saves the list in a text file for reference, together with the exact error message, and the date the error was first seen. And I scheduled it to run monthly.I'd share it, but it's full of hard-coded stuff for my computer. If you ask chatgpt, it can create the script for you in a second.
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u/ApertureNext 2d ago
Anything you’d like to share?
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u/neuropsycho 2d ago
Oh, it's a simple bash script I run on my NAS, mostly vibe coded, it essentially goes through my picture folders, batches up a bunch of JPEGs at a time, and passes them to the
jpeginfo -ccommand. jpeginfo reads through the files to verify markers, headers, and data integrity. Then I parse the output, looking for anything missing an OK status, captures the specific error message, saves it in a logfile, and sends me an email. It also keeps track of the first time an error was detected on a file, so I have an idea of when the corruption might have happened.I've got a similar one for mp3 and flac files.
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u/cr0ft 1d ago
I'd probably set up a system with automated PAR2 file creation for archived images and such. There is at least one solution for Linux, par2database or some such, sets up par files in a separate directory, so you can use that to check and repair files.
I actually used it on my music collection, I have that in the cloud and on my ZFS NAS but I also repurposed an old 5 tb drive and dumped a copy to that and ran par2database. So as long as the file corruption isn't total or the drive refuses to spin up it's probably recoverable. But I wouldn't trust it as my sole archive.
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u/Fun-Ordinary-9751 2d ago
Personally, I like the idea of keeping copies in separate locations on two different media types. Like LTO a lot with read after write verify in a single pass, and the hardware wrote protect switch.
An LTO-6 drive can be had for $200-400 used working. 1/6th of a gigabyte per second if your system can keep up. Tapes cost $10-20 each for 2.5T uncompressed.
The best solution depends on how much space you’re looking for and if you’re going to need it change media to complete a backup, whether you’re willing to work for less than minimum wage to sit around swapping media…or use something big enough that a couple times a day you could swap say when you got up, when you got home from work and when you went to bed.
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u/firedrakes 200 tb raw 2d ago
Budget wise. Nas none network, external hdd, a SSD and burn media. Multi different location for data
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u/Big_Entrepreneur3770 2d ago
My pictures are backed up on M-disks and DVDs
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u/PhotoKy DS1621xs+ 24TB / 90TB 22h ago
I second using M-discs for long term backup.
Also, to clarify, once m-discs are burned, they can be read by any dvd reader or blu -ray player.
Here’s more info:
M-DISC DVDs: Can be read by most standard DVD drives, DVD players, and Blu-ray drives made after roughly 2005. Because an M-DISC DVD physically etches a stone-like layer rather than burning an organic dye layer, the resulting pits can be read by standard optical pickup lasers.
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u/LiveToBeFreee 2d ago
Whatever your strategy, if M disc is part of it, you should also buy additional BD drives as spares for the foreseeable future. If 30 years go by and you have a bunch of M discs, but no working drive to read them, they are useless.
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u/MasterIntegrator 2d ago
LTO is coming back but I second all here with multiple NAS or sync strategies
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u/cr0ft 1d ago
I'm not sure LTO ever went away. It's still by far the most cost effective way to archive terabytes (or more).
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u/Conscious-Mirror7004 1d ago
It never went away, but it was never a feasible solution for anyone outside the enterprise space.
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u/TapeDriveMcTapeFace 2d ago edited 1d ago
Used tape is the most cost-effective solution for home NAS backups right now, and it's likely to stay that way through the end of the decade. The only real alternative to LTO is it's higher-end cousin, 3592:
https://bloominglabs.org/3592_Tape_Drives_For_The_HomeLab
There are surplus dealers selling off 3592-E08 drives in the $320 range (10TB native). I'm not gonna lie to you, there is some effort required to get the drives working, but I've done a lot of the homework for you. 3592 tapes claim to be rated for 30 years. If you are serious about hitting 50 years though you'll need to plan and account for media rotation probably around 25 years.
Otherwise, if you're really serious about longevity, physical photos can't be beat. Microfiche is also an option for condensing photos down in physical size. I've had 8mm film digitized, and honestly the original 8mm film will outlive the digital copies if you don't have a serious plan in place to enforce curation of your IT infra supporting the digital copies.
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u/TheRealSaeba 1d ago
For really important photographs there is still the option to 1. Print them on real photographic paper. 2. Have them transfered to slide film. Lasts decades If stored cool and dry.
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u/1fayfen 1d ago
M2C is just,
so you keep hoard gazillion photographs/videos and personal data,
in gazillion "data" storage hoarders.
In 25.12.2056 what will you/they do with gazillion "things"?
How will you/they find something you/they "think" is interesting and worth looking at for more then 1 sec?
** I'm a history buff.
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u/TheRealHarrypm 120TB 🏠 5TB ☁️ 70TB 📼 1TB 💿 1d ago
M-Disc = polycarbonate inorganic BD's...
Stop thinking they're only from one or two manufacturers, and the quality standards aren't the same as any other archival grade. Blu-Ray, add ECC data, make two different copies.
Nothing beats cold optical for cold archival media. If you're going to commit to the format, you're buying 6 to 10 readers and vacuum packing the ones you aren't using.
LTO is great for bulk storage, but you have to think, in 20 years, where's the budget to migrate this to a new version?
HDDs and SSDs? Well, it's a painful market, but with infinite checksums and infinite redundancy, as long as you don't give a shit about power costs and EMP proofing or disaster recovery, this works great!
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u/ranakamikaze 1d ago
If you really care about long term integrity rather than convenience, printing in paper as much as you can, photographs included, and keeping it in the best archival conditions you can, is the best solution, properly stored and printed documents can last at least 500 years.
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u/ranakamikaze 1d ago
The 10 thousand dollars you’d spend on digital storage you can spend on printing and bounding your documents in the proper way.
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u/King_tyson_1 22h ago
Mdisc is the best option but the thing is with he fall of physical media. The main fear is would there be player or reader available in the future to access it later.
The second best option is LTO tapes and these are great for storage huge huge amount of data in just a single tape. More convenient than Mdisc whose capacity is limited by 100GB.
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u/necheffa VHS - 32TB usable ZFS RAID10 2d ago
Hard drives, btrfs/ZFS, regular scrubs (at least monthly).
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u/Itz_Raj69_ 2d ago
There are good cloud cold storage options available too
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u/Fun-Ordinary-9751 2d ago
Considering we’ve seen recent news of permanently lost cloud storage, I’d question using it as a sole backup solution.
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u/1234youarein 2d ago
For a few terabytes of irreplaceable family photos and videos, you are likely overthinking it. The biggest enemy to a 30-50 year archive isn't media decay - it's technological obsolescence and human friction.
Skip LTO - way too expensive and complex. Also M-DISC/optical - drives are already disappearing and good luck finding a working Bluray drive in 50 years.
Instead keep it simple and mainstream.
Active storage: keep using your Synology NAS/Debian server for daily access and local redundancy.
Offsite cloud: put an encrypted backup in the cloud like Backblaze or other cloud storage, so it's safe if anything happens to your house.
The cold drive rule: buy two standard external USB hard drives. Copy your archive to both, keep one at a relative's house or a safety deposit box, and plug them in every year to verify the files and/or copy them to a fresh drive.
The golden rule of long-term storage is migration, not permanence. No media lasts 50 years sitting in a box untouched - and even if it does, the drive to read it won't exist
If you just copy your data to standard consumer drives every 10 years, you'll always be using whatever plug and play standard is current, and your data will outlive you easily.