I have quite a few DVDs of non-critical archived material - burned in different years, different disc manufacturers, different drives - but certainly some are now about 10 years old.
I've read this question:
What medium should be used for long term, high volume, data storage (archival)?
about long-term archival media, and I understand there is no silver bullet, but my dilemma has some specific constraints:
- I (think I) have to replace my aging DVDs with something
- I'm willing to spend no more than a few hundred USD, maybe even less. In fact, if I lost this entire archive, I would be annoyed and distraught, but not devastated.
- The archived material does not become useless if some of it is lost
- I want to reduce the amount of space my archive takes up; right now my DVDs are in an 'album' of sleeves.
So, I was considering switching to a portable HDD. I'm assuming that I'll replace it every 10 years or so with whatever is available then; but I still fear for the longevity of this choice. With that in mind,
- How useful is it to use ZFS with Reed-Solomon codes for storage?
- Are there other software solutions (not RAID, since we're talking about a single drive, but perhaps RAID between areas of the drive) I could use to increase longevity?
- Is it a good idea to buy two different portable HDDs and occasionally overwrite one of them with the other?
- Is the longevity of SSDs higher than that of HDDs when writes are infrequent, as in my case?
- Should I maybe just get a BluRay recorder and some good-quality discs instead?
To emphasize: I need to make a decision for my own specific scenario.
