Ask HN: Best Long(ish)-Term Storage Format?

HDD drives, SSD drives, and flash drives are out, because you have to keep checking file integrity at some cadence and then replacing disks every 5 years anyway or whenever you decide is right. Unless you want to maintain disk arrays as a hobby, that seems out. Tape backups are out too, for similar reasons, because doing that right too becomes a time-consuming and expensive hobby quite rapidly.

So, best as I can tell, that leaves us with:

- Print any important text. File this in labeled 3-ring binders in boxes or on shelves, or put the paper in labeled hanging folders in file cabinet drawers. Use whisper to convert audio or video to text transcripts before printing, if needed.

- For multimedia or software files, burn them to 25GB Blu-ray M-Disc media (or pick another capacity if better for your needs), and store these in the most moderate/stable environment you can easily provide with respect to temperature, humidity, and vibration.

If you want to pay continual fees and rely on someone else to rotate disks, you could throw a copy on Backblaze or Amazon Glacier or Wasabi or whatever, but personally I wouldn't necessarily count on that because to me clouds seem like they could evaporate accidentally, YMMV.

Or does “the first result for USB flash drive is 9 cents a gigabyte” point at an unmentioned requirement of how much data you intend to store?

I've had good luck with hard drives, but I've never knocked one off a shelf, nor do I have any strong magnetic fields in my house like you seem to. I keep them in my basement, one in a lockbox.