[cpburns2009]

There's a post on Super User that contains useful information:

"What medium should be used for long term, high volume, data storage (archival)?" https://superuser.com/q/374609/52739

It mostly focuses on the media instead of formats though.

[zokier]

Personally I think the premise of the question is poor. Attempting to build monolithic long term (100+ years) cold storage of significant amount of data is a folly, instead the only reasonable approach is to do it in smaller parts (maybe 10-20 years) and plan for migrations.

[paulmd]

It all depends on what your definition of "high-volume" is, and just how "archival" your access patterns really are.

Amazon Glacier runs on BDXL disc libraries (like a tape library). There's nothing truly expensive about producing BDXL media, there just isn't enough volume in the consumer market to make it worthwhile. If you contract directly with suppliers for a few million discs at a time, that's not an issue (you did say high-volume, right?).

https://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bd...

For medium-scale users, tape libraries are still the way to go. You can have petabytes of near-line storage in a rack. Storage conditions are not really a concern in a datacenter, which is where they should live.

(CERN has about 200 petabytes of tapes for their long-term storage.)

https://home.cern/about/updates/2017/07/cern-data-centre-pas...

If you mean "high-volume for a small business", probably also tapes, or BD discs with 20% parity encoding to guard against bitrot.

Small users should also consider dumping it in Glacier as a fallback - make it Amazon's problem. If you have a significant stream of data it'll get expensive over time, but if it's business-critical data then you don't really have a choice, do you?

[jlgaddis]

> Amazon Glacier runs on BDXL disc libraries ...

This has been a rumor I've heard for quite a while (probably since shortly after Glacier was announced) but has it ever been confirmed?

[Lionsion]

Thanks, I'll take a look. Though I think I have the media question answered, and I settled on M-DISC for personal stuff (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC). It only has special requirements for writing, reading can be done on standard drives.

[cpburns2009]

I went with M-Disc too and an LG Blu-ray burner. I think you only need a special burner if you're using the DVDs. I want to say most Blu-ray burners work.