@dalias @gloriouscow Even tapes don’t survive well unattended. The base gets brittle over time and fails. They last better than flash or spinning drives, but not *that much* better. I’ve been asked to digitize 30-year-old VHS and reel-to-reel tapes which just crumbled when I tried to examine them.

Long-term data preservation takes active work. If you want something to last decades, you need to build it to be fault-tolerant, you need to test it regularly to catch failures before they exceed the fault tolerance, and you need to fix the failures.

@dalias @gloriouscow SSDs stored in a controlled climate will generally also also retain data for decades. My point is the data loss concern for unattended flash is overblown (much like concern about flash wear), and other media types are also risky to leave unattended.

Basically anything but burnable optical media will last at least two years stored in a climate which doesn’t kill people. Store it with climate control, and it’ll last a decade, maybe two. Tape might last twice as long as an SSD, but it won’t reliably make it to the next bracket up.