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Comment by grishka | Hacker News Reader

The problem with cloud storage is that it's a needy thing. You have to pay for it in periodic payments the whole time it exists. And it's also controlled by someone else.

I do really wish there to be a type of storage medium that I could record, store somewhere, and forget about. And then when I need it years later, it would still be perfectly readable. Optical discs are indeed kinda that, but their reliability is hit or miss.

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Get DVD-Rs with gold foil. "Archival grade"

https://www.amazon.com/Verbatim-DVD-R-4-7GB-UltraLife-Archiv...

A desktop CNC engraver can be had for $500. Stones are cheap.

Archaeologists have read engraved stones after thousands of years of neglect!

And how many did they fail to read?

The ones where the cavemen forgot to engrave checksum data.

Of the ones that were stored appropriately, virtually all are still readable.

Whether the format it was written in is still comprehensible could be a more pertinent question.

A fair number only fragments remain. Probably most, though I'm not an archaeologist.

You jest, but here's an idea: print a block of raised letters (like old typesetting) on a 3D resin printer (mirror the characters). Roll a thin slab of potter's clay, say 5"x 8". Press the text against the blank slab, fire the clay in a kiln, and voilà, your bio or other precious document will last like Babylonian clay tablets.

I might have to try this with my RSA public key.

I concur, there is no "fire and forget" solution comparable to what a physical medium gives you. And I could have probably avoided the CD-RW corruption by dumping the whole image on a new CD / DVD / USB storage every now and then.

I also have some external magnetic HDD that is now already ~10 years old, stored in the same conditions as the aforementioned CD, let see how it fares in 2032 :)

Chose CD/DVD as archival medium was one of the big mistakes I've ever made. Most CDs/DVDs failed just after around 10 years. HDDs seem to be much more reliable.

There are several models of DVD called “M-DISC” which have gold plating. They are advertised as lasting hundreds of years.

Unless you plan on digging a hole in the forest, every type of storage is going to cost some type of upkeep.

But keeping a box of storage media in your closet doesn't cost you anything extra, as opposed to cloud storage.

How expensive is your housing per square foot? I suspect cloud storage is cheaper.

I don't know how common it is to own your living space in the US, but where I'm from, it is fairly common. And I don't think "how expensive per square foot" is applicable when you aren't renting.

But either way, you won't be paying more in rent and/or utilities for having an extra box in your closet.

Unless that one box is the one that causing you to buy/rent more space to store things. In general storage space is very lumpy - people have a fair amount free until they don't and need to get more space - when you get more space you tend to get a lot more. (Of course downsize/decluttering is also an option)

We use square meters in Denmark. The diameter of a CD/DVD is 120 mm, so you can fit 64 CD's per m² if you order them in a grid (more if you do not) A CD is 1.2 mm think. The ceiling height in my apartment is ca 2.7m, so I could fit 14400 CD's per m². If a DVD can store 10 GByte, that is ca 144 TByte.

The average rent per square meter is about $20/month (more in Copenhagen, less outside the big cities).

I suspect I can not store 144TByte in the cloud for $20/month.

You might argue that I do have that many DVD's. But then I do have many small corners and shelves that is not much use for anything else. And it would be even more unlikely to be able to store say 14 TByte in the cloud for $2/month.

Thanks for doing the math; you're right!

Google Archive storage is $0.0012/month (3x cheaper than Amazon Glacier, which surprised me). 144TB would be $173/month, so 9x cheaper to keep in your home.

I think your estimate of how many DVDs you can put in a given space is a bit optimistic: you're assuming no protection between discs and that a floor-to-ceiling tower is stable. If instead we imagine putting them in cases that double their thickness and putting collections of them in boxes that add 10% to the total height, though, it's 4x cheaper to keep them in your apartment. But if you use Blu-ray instead of DVD it's 20x cheaper!

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