At this point no one knows how long the chip shortage will continue, but most sources expect it to last years. Cloud is now the only reasonably priced storage available, IMO.
Is there someone you would trust with all your photos? Google, and prossibly other services, will allow you to share your entire library with one other person.
Not a solution, but we all need to remember that even with the high prices of processors and storage, we are fortunate to have very inexpensive tech available to us for purchase.
Those of us that started back in the CP/M and Apple II days can still remember the first PC’s selling for $3000+ and my first laptop with decent ram and storage for starting my own consulting cost $5000.
And that was in 1990 dollars, not adjusted for inflation equivalents in today’s $$$.
If protecting your data with a local copy is valuable to you, I posit that even today’s cost of storage is actually quite affordable - just not as cheap as 6 months or 1 year ago.
I wager that nobody in these forums has to give up food or drink, we just don’t WANT to spend larger amounts of money for storage, right?
Maybe I can back up to cassette tape like I did on my TI/99 4A. Couldn’t afford a Mac back then but ultimately got an Apple //c.
Right now everything is on iCloud but I suspect I’m the only one who knows how that works.
I would and am considering M-Disc. But this does not seem to have taken off in this country. Some Amazon reviews are disturbing. I am curious about people experience with the long=term storage CD’s.
The thing with making digital content accessible for relatives, friends or anybody in the future when we are “dead and gone” is that I cannot help myself thinking that this is something that cannot be really done reliably.
Tech enthusiasts and geeks come up with ideas and solutions, but they are not really for everybody. No matter what storage option. No matter what file format. It may work for some persons in the family if they know where to look and what to do for a limited time. I doubt that it will work for data and descendants in the far future.
Photos and words on acid-free paper may be the best option for stuff that you want to be accessible in the long run. Everybody has eyes to read documents and to look at photos.
If data is being stored in iCloud, setting up a Legacy Contact is a good idea:
Regarding M-Discs… Be careful. There have been reports that they also can fail quite soon (especially discs that have been manufactured lately) and even if not: I have doubts that everybody will have an optical drive 20 years from now (or even 10 years)…
The article is from 2026. What is even more interesting are the comments below the article. Everybody has his/her own ideas and opinions - and as far as I am concerned: nobody has a solution that does make sense to me.
Keeping digital data accessible in the long term is a process that never ends. Somebody has to take care of the data and its storage medium. Data has to be backed up, checked and maybe migrated eventually. I don’t see how the average person is supposed to manage that in the long run…
This is exactly the problem with analog data storage, though the issue is centuries not years. Objects decay.
I think if you can reduce the archive items in numbers, add specific metadata and names, and distribute them widely to people, that’s your best bet for long-term storage.
Consider giving people printed versions as well as digital.
Perhaps not a popular opinion, but do we really need to keep all this stuff? Even photos? I would hazard a guess that many people do not really spend much time looking at their photos and reading past emails.
Personally, apart from legal/financial data I’m not sure how important it really is. My daughter said she would look at my photo archive when I’m gone and then archive it. I doubt my grand kids would even look at at. Especially if everyone archives their stuff who would have time to look at generations of data?
What would the world do with billions of people all archiving stuff? Or a billion Anne Frank diaries? They’ll be all too busy doom scrolling social media! 
I have spent the last six months dealing with my Mom’s estate, and making difficult decisions about what to keep personally, what to give to other family members, what to donate, what to digitize and distribute, and what to discard.
It’s been difficult and is not yet over.
Do it now, distribute it now, donate or discard now, don’t wait.
Don’t wait for someone else to make their best guess regarding what you would want.
I love my Mom, but this is a horrible task.
I’m sorry you have to face that, not easy. My father passed in 2022 and I was given his old camcorder and everyone wanted me to send them the videos. I still have not converted them and not one family member has asked about them. It seemed important at the time and if I asked everyone today if they wanted them they’d all say yes, but no one will chase it. People are just too busy. If I sent them the videos they’d archive it to ‘look at later’. I doubt later will ever arrive.
I better get on with converting them!
My parents died in 2006 and 2010. They had thousands of slides they took in their travels over all seven continents in their retirement. I digitized them all (they used Ektachrome instead of Kodachrome, which is another archival mistake) for them. But after their death I deleted all the files because they carried no memories for myself or other living relatives.
Great point, but I can’t even get my family members to edit photos as they take them. They fire off a burst of 10 or 20 photos and never cull them down to the 1 or 2 that might be worth keeping.
Unfortunately, I fear that technology has made it too easy to have an explosion of unnecessary data.
Maybe we need to lobby of tons of “home organizers” on YouTube to get the word out on editing digital data in addition to their endless videos on “editing” one’s closet or junk drawer?
Hmm…It does appear hard to find Blu-ray drives from reputable brands now. Perhaps it is time for me to go ahead and buy a spare Blu-ray drive to store alongside my blu-ray archive discs.
When I inherited the family photo albums from my parents, there were tons of photos that were completely meaningless to me and my siblings–people who we didn’t know. But there were also photos from our childhood that have tremendous sentimental value–especially now as we are entering the oldest living generation in our family and have kids of our own.
I think my photo preservation goals are to make sure I would only lose my family photos in a true apocalypse–i.e., make sure they would be safe if my house burns down, hackers wipe all the drives connected to my computer, takeover and delete my cloud storage accounts, etc. I want the photos to be safe and accessible long enough to outlive me and allow my kids to copy them and preserve them (or not) as they see fit.
The real challenge will probably be sorting through all the hundreds of thousands of photos to find the really good ones.
I solved the future generation problem (our “kids” are ~50 years old now) by putting all their childhood photos on DVDs and giving each the entire collection. They can decide what they want to do with them. When my wife and I go, everything we have can be safely deleted without burdening them. Nobody will want photos from our childhood. The kids assume all responsibility for photos taken in their adulthood. Not our problem.
Let’s not overthink this.
I’m going to have to sort through thousands of 35mm slides, picking a much reduced set to digitize. I am planning to hire a service to clean and scan the, starting with a sample scan from at least two providers. Then I’ll distribute them in at least two formats.
I do not want to have to do this again, ever.
Lost decades of the backups done on archival CD’s about 25 years ago fortunately only one of various storage media for the archive so not a total disaster but not something I trust for long term storage at all.
I have gone the other way, I am digitizing all that are saved but it’s already a much reduced set. I ended up buying a slide scanner, cheaper than the cost of having a service digitize the ones I want to keep.
Because it looks like it is possible Blu-ray burners are becoming harder to find, I just purchased the Buffalo BRXL-PUS6U3-BK Blu-ray burner as a backup burner/reader. I will store it with my BD-R archives so that I (or whoever inherits my archived family media) will be able to read the discs. Some other good options are: ASUS SBW-06D5H-U BDXL or ASUS SBW-06D2X-U.
I also picked up three more of: Verbatim BD-R 25GB 16X Blu-ray Recordable Media Disc - 50 Pack Spindle - 98397 for $52.95 each. Based on the current rate at which our family photo/video collection is growing, I should now have enough BD-R discs to make annual archives for the next 30 years. (File sizes will likely grow over time, and I have factored that in.) It works out to $42.36/TB = $1.41/TB/yr. for 30 years. That seems reasonable for backups that should easily last that long (stored in a dark, air conditioned environment) and are completely immune to viruses/ransomware or account takeover/deletion.
Back in the dawn of time I worked at a small company that made CD-ROMs, and sometimes, Redbook Audio CDs, for retail sale, as well as laserdiscs
I have had media from the 1990s to 2002 fail that were
CD-Audio commercially produced CDs
CD-Roms that were commercially produced
One-off CD-ROMs
They fail typically becuase of a fungus/mold/mildew eating the glue
Layers separating because the glue failed
Glue aging producing cloudy spots that confuse the laser
The heavy glass masters have shown no sign of failure, stored under the same archival conditions. (50F, sealed, dry, humidity regulated)