In time, we'll all consider this issue (the dearth of physical media) one of the most important of our current era.
The bulk of all that precious data your family is hoarding is going to bite the dust before you do.
All those drives with your home videos are rusting away. They won't last into your old age.
All those photos you entrusted to FA*NG companies - some of whom won't be around in 10 years, and none of whom will remember they ever had your data in 50 - they're going away, too.
If you want to keep your data into your old age, you might have luck with a tape drive, but I wouldn't trust the tape to last 50+ years, nor the ability to find a working drive that can read them.
The only viable option for keeping data, if you give it serious thought, is recordable Bluray.
So decreased availability is lousy news for the public. For future historians... depressing.
The only viable option for reliably keeping data is to care.
Keep several copies in different locations or on different services. Use these storages regularly so you always know they are accessible and working, or at least check them once in a year. If one of them goes bad (service discontinued, media unreadable, technologically outdated, whatever): find a new location for your data and copy it all over.
Everything else isn't reliable long-term storage, but a lucky shot that might work for you in 50 years, but might as well irrecoverably go down the drain in the meantime.
That said, maybe one in 1000 people here is going to successfully stick to a regimen of regular backups all the way to their old age. That's the HN crowd, not the general public who have never heard of the Rule of Three. People get distracted with life, or become incapacitated, or find themselves moving across the country, or make mistakes.
Without recordable Bluray, it's all much more difficult. Discs don't need regular checkups the way magnetic, cloud and electronic media do because they have fewer issues drying out, rusting out, suffering head crashes or suddenly vanishing due to someone else's corporate decisions.
It depends. Cheap pressings of optical media experience bitrot. I'm certain some of my bootleg DVDs are functionally unreadable now but were usable in the past.
From what I can find online, the lifetime of a BD-R disk is only 5-10 years. Those recordable Bluerays you're holding on to may _already_ have gone bad.
I think that's much shorter than real life outcomes.
Just last week, I was looking for some old data. I dug through a small collection of cheap CD-R backups from 30 years ago (hard to believe the tech is that old!). Probably 12 discs in total. No problem physically reading any of them. The only issue is that one of them was recorded in an old pre-OSX Mac format that my Linux laptop struggled with, but I was able to access it on my 2015 MacBook.
I didn't want to sound like an advertisement, but I use M-disc media. It's basically Bluray, but should last a couple centuries. The M actually is for 'millennium', but I wouldn't bank on 1000 years.
I have a Verbatim M-DISC BD-R that I torture test. It was one of the first ones I burned. I burned it in 2018. I flex it all the time, use it as a coaster on my desk, leave it out on my patio in the sun for weeks at a time. I rinse it off with pool water and wipe it off with paper towels. It has yet to lose a single bit.
If this 20ish gigs of data hasn't had a single bit of corruption, I doubt most of the other discs in climate controlled storage in multiple locations have had much errors either.
There are many sources saying that BD-R discs should last decades if not a 100 years. One of the main reasons why BD M-Discs never took off was the fact that they didn't offer any substantial advantages over regular BD-Rs.
I also hope to last decades, so to me there is a world of difference between media that lasts 30 or 40 years, and media that lasts 100 or 200 years. For better or worse, as long as we both avoid accidents, an M-disc will outlast me.
From my research into it some time ago - BDXL quad layer(128GB) BD-Rs are made basically in the same technology as M-Disc, so they should last hundreds of years, so that's all I've been using for my archival needs so far. Getting them from Amazon japan is pretty cost effective too.
It depends on the dye used. Older CD-Rs had a really bad dye formulation. Better formulations were created but most of us just bought blank disks based on what was cheapest not what dye was used.
Even the newer ones will still degrade quite rapidly in direct sunlight, so the method of storage is also important (spindles in your bookcase that get hit by sunlight = bad).
FWIW I archived all my CD-Rs and DVD-Rs when the oldest ones were just about 15 years old and aside from one ultra-cheap disc where the top was literally flaking off they all read fine in ddrescue.
I was part of an effort at my last job to archive some of the source code for our oldest projects(from the 90s), they were all on CDs stored in a vault with an external storage company, we retrieved the boxes and found that 1 in 5 discs didn't read at all. The blue verbatim discs had a 100% success rate, but any disc with that green hue underside was a toss up whether it would read or not. Interestingly though, over hundreds of discs I found that either the disc read and would rip correctly all the way, or it wouldn't work at all in the first place.
Practically all the CD-Rs I burned on good media have lasted over 20 years now. Only a few have had noticeable issues of the ones sold as "archive-quality" media.
Sure, almost all my cheap ones have died out, but even some of those are still pretty OK.
I could read several QIC-02 tapes after ~15 years (~'90 to '05). I tried again after 20 years and the tapes jammed. I guess the tensioning system lost it's elasticity.
HDDs I had from ~1997 started to accumulate bad sectors after ~10 years. HDDs from 2010 are still good today, but just to be safe I'm using RAID5 with different batches of drives and 2 offline backups.
I saw a 5.25" 360K floppy that was used daily to boot a 8086 until 1997 (I have no ideea how old it was, but it really was a 360K, not a 1.2MB, re-formatted low density). I have early 1990s 3.5" 1.44MB FDs that still work. Late floppy disks were mostly singe-use bad.
The biggest problem with tapes was the ISA-based controller. No such troubles with HDDs. PCIe to PATA or USB3 to PATA are still available today. I wonder how long QLC SSDs will hold data? Is it turning into a "buy new - copy old data - keep 1 year - repeat" ?
I've thought about this a bit, as well. Simply as neither physical nor "cloud" services can really be expected to last.
The solution, in my mind, is that there should be an open source standard of "grouped media items" which can be easily imported / exported between services (being: a diy home server, or a cloud service, or a "burn to disk" program, etc.) which then allows for easier redundancy and updating.
For a very simple example, you could use a zip file that you upload everywhere and put onto USB/CD-ROM. But whatever the system is, it would have to be easy and attractive to use.
I'm trying to go about doing that with building digitapes[0] but I don't know how to really build "a standard" other than building something and hope that it becomes status quo.. (I'm also getting way too into work recently, so I need more time and energy to work on it)
It's a little bit embarrassingly unfinished in all regards. But eventually I want to make a system where an app allows you to easily share your files onto S3, which you can easily download onto a disk, which you can easily connect to mirror on YouTube, etc. All open source and independently connectable.
How about make a copy to an external drive? If you want to be sure do 2. Check them every 5-10 years, replace as needed when connectors get discontinued (eg Firewire -> USB-C).
Bonus: Keep backup with external cloud service.
No need to make overly complicated. No need to do Bluray.
The bulk of all that precious data your family is hoarding is going to bite the dust before you do.
All those drives with your home videos are rusting away. They won't last into your old age.
All those photos you entrusted to FA*NG companies - some of whom won't be around in 10 years, and none of whom will remember they ever had your data in 50 - they're going away, too.
If you want to keep your data into your old age, you might have luck with a tape drive, but I wouldn't trust the tape to last 50+ years, nor the ability to find a working drive that can read them.
The only viable option for keeping data, if you give it serious thought, is recordable Bluray.
So decreased availability is lousy news for the public. For future historians... depressing.