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Spinning drives are much more reliable as long-term cold storage than even SLC SSDs, and relying on self-burned optical discs is a disaster waiting to happen.
Just get a load of powered external USB 3.5" SATA caddies and fill them with 14TB spinning drives of various makes (helps to avoid a 'bad batch' from a single manufacturer) and dash them in various locations. Not that expensive these days.
If you really care about long-term archival cold storage, then magnetic tape is still king.
ectoplasmosis-
relying on self-burned optical discs is a disaster waiting to happen.
Relying on them might be, but they still saved my ass as they were done before I had any cloud storage. They're also mega convenient for 'non-critical' backups or bunging stuff on a disc for a mate when you don't want to give them a whole drive or sending stuff overseas for the same reason.
I thought magnetic drives were more reliable (I'll still not use them myself) but then I did a quick google:
What do you make of this?
hippy
Well, I'm ok with them because I saved some pictures I'd lost by restoring from backup CDs that were maybe 10-15 years old. There's also M-DISC or whatever the archival-specific backup discs are.
The benefit of the optical was: it was cheap and yeah I had multiple burns over the years so I managed to get back various bits of lost pictures from over time that must have been missed during a HDD migration or failure or something.