What do you consider the best method for long-term cold data storage? And why?

I was looking at some magnetic tapes, but the degradation of magnetic charge is worrying me. Lose a single bit and you're fucked.

Dvds - not sure, some of my old ones are no longer readable. Not sure why tho, they had been enclosed in a dark, room-temp place all the time

hdds -- still magnetic.

Ssds? Idk

...?

📍

There are M-Discs.
Essentially DVDs, but with an inorganic recording layer.

That's way you have redundancy and unfortunately, I don't think we've solved that problem with conventional hard disks yet. On another note; https://digitaltrends.com/cool-tech...

I have come across these in the past, but I haven't tested them out.

Archival grade blue-rays,
They claim to last up-to 50 years.

https://panasonic.net/cns/...

Print your data onto parchment or vellum. The original Magna Carta can still be read from Vellum

Sticking my SSDs in the freezer. With a long cable...

Tapes seem to be often used for it in enterprise environments anyway. But that's really *cold* cold storage. You can't actively use them in any way other than sequential. Just like in old video cassettes the time to go back to the beginning is huge. And tape drives are really expensive. For personal use anyway I'm currently looking at HGST MegaScale 4TB spinning drives, they seem to be hot enough for active backups and are reasonably priced for scalability as well.

You can try to find out how they made the Arch that went with the first Falcon Heavy.

From the news:

The Arch on board is a data crystal (sort of like a Jedi Holocron if you’re mad for Star Wars lore) that contains all three books from Isaac Asimov’s classic Foundation trilogy. It’s actually a modest amount of data relative to the possibilities of the storage medium – in this case, a quartz silica structure which, using 5D optical storage techniques, can eventually achieve a max storage capacity of 360 terabytes on a disk just 3.75 inches in diameter.

@Nanos yepp, so them stones it is [at least until they perfect the @badfox 'es mentioned glass storage]!

~ # modprobe stone_carving_drv

NFS with redundancies. Restore from backup every month to make sure backup isnt corrupted.

Long-term cold storage Huh, well, the best for me is someone else's storage. Cloud storage to be exact as they're likely to have redundancy and maintain their drives properly.

You can always encrypt it before sending so they can't read your data if they tried.