I’ve recently been scanning old family photos to digital, usually either as JPEGs or TIFFS, and home movies to MP4 What would be the most ideal / safe storage medium that could ensure both could be easily accessed and viewed in 20-40 years?
And not the older type you can get cheap at Costco etc. Get SSD solid state drives. I do video and photography and those 5 Tb drives for $69 will absolutely fail over time. Spend the extra and get digital drives. And yes, at least one backup.
Replace your backup drives with new ones every so often. After 5-7 years maybe. Drives do not last forever. I recently had a backup drive that was less than 5 years old die upon startup. (It was a regular HD, not an SSD). Old spinny drives will die sooner or later, they've been around long enough that we know that. SSDs haven't, so I'd keep an eye on those until they've proven themselves over the years. It also wouldn't hurt to burn them to a CD-R or DVD-R, if you have a drive and the media (or know someone who does). If stored correctly, they have a long life. I have 25 year old CD-Rs that still read just fine. And I just checked an 18 year old DVD-R for some photos the other day, and it reads fine. The more backup, the better.
I do the same, I put them in different folders. Family, holiday, garden, hobbies etc., and then by year.
I store all my photos on USB flash drives. Cost, convenience, and portability are hard to beat. Worried about one failing? Just buy a second. Lastly, USB connectors on computers seem to have a long life, with the connections being upgraded (USB 4 V2 is already planned out). USB Type-C and USB 3.1, USB 3.2, USB4 and USB4 V2 Explained .
Remember to back up regularly your second hard drive/USB or whatever. I keep my main library on my laptop and I surprise myself how long I sometimes leave it before I back up everything, including photos.
I have a bunch of video I saved from the early days of HDTV on a hard drive. The drive refuses to spin. I also burned lots of HDTV shows on DVD-R (a half hour show took an entire disc). Those discs still read perfectly and they're nearly twenty years old.
Choose the highest/resolution format available for the content type and means of scanning, choosing lossless whenever possible. Don’t skimp here to save space, storage is cheap.
We just buy a sp!tload of drives, and keep a set at home and at the office. Really important "work" files, I keep in the cloud and on the local drive in the room. For my 20,000+ CD collection, I have four drives: the "Main" drive, plus Backup1, Backup2, and Backup3, all Apple Lossless files on WD 18GB drives in G-Tech enclosures. They work great for our purposes. (We guy the enclosures as B-stock, through out the small drives, and replace them with much higher-capacity drives.) I also have a smaller subset of about 1000,000 songs as 320Kbps AAC files for various iPods, and all that's up on Apple Music as well.
also, organize the photos by subject and use, if possible, files names and folder names that will help anyone looking at them in the future identify them. Better yet, write up a document or spreadsheet that lists each photo or group of photos by file name with everything you know about the image/s and the people in it/them. Save that document as a pdf and store it with the photos. I led the team that archived approximately 4 million photos from the Obama White House to the National Archives, and these basics go a long way in making preserved photos accessible over the long term. Obviously the scale is different but all the above points hold.
