[nadir_ishiguro]

I personally don't believe an archival storage, at least for personal use.

Data has to be living if it is to be kept alive, so keeping the data within reach, moving it to new media over time and keeping redundant copies seems like the best way to me.

Once things are put away, I fear the chances of recovering that data steadily reduce over time.

[lurk2]

> Once things are put away, I fear the chances of recovering that data steadily reduce over time.

I’ve run into this a lot. You store a backup of some device without really thinking of it, then over time the backup gets migrated to another drive but the device it ran on is lost and can’t be replaced. I remember reading a post years ago where someone commented that you don’t need a better storage solution, you need fewer files in simpler formats. I never took his advice, but I think he might have been right.

[andrewaylett]

I won't archive anything on portable media.

Cloud, or variants thereof, is fine -- I use rsync.net for backup and archive. But needing to manually run a backup (say, onto a thumb drive) is not sustainable, and even though the author suggests that disks (spinning rust or optical) might actually have a reasonable lifespan, I don't trust myself to be able to recover data from them if I want it.

As the author says, the limiting factor isn't technical. For media, it's economic. For any archival system it's also going to be social. There's a reason that organisations that really need to keep their archives have professional archivists, and it's not because it's easy :).