A Long Term Thing

We store so much of what matters most in our lives digitally nowadays. Photos, important documents, passwords and ultimately memories all reside on our computers and smart devices. In order to keep these things safe (or transport our data) we resort to saving our files in various places, such as on portable drives or the cloud. Where then is the most reliable place to store things, and is there such a thing as forever-proofing something digital which we simply couldn’t afford to lose?

First, let’s breeze through some common but deeply historic storage methods. Regrettably, I’m old enough to remember using floppy disks to save my files. These held a whopping 1.4 megabytes and were relatively prone to failure if not stored very carefully. Often, mine would get corrupted once loaded with homework, at some point between removing them from the (very beige) computer, and arriving at school with them. Not ideal for long term storage. After this, we had writable CDs, and eventually DVDs. While much more robust than a floppy disk, these needed to be protected from scratches and will actually “rot” over time. Depending on the specific type, they’re usually rated as lasting between five and 50 years when stored in ideal conditions.

Moving now into something we’re still using in 2023; portable USB drives. The most common of these is the “thumb drive” style, which originally came in just an eight megabyte size. These drives are now affordable, sizable, and relatively robust depending on their design. They are still susceptible to data loss however, and the more you use them, the faster this begins. Flash memory, the technology underpinning memory cards, thumb drives and in fact most modern on-device storage comes with a caveat. This is that each chip can only withstand a finite number of times being written to. Newer drives are much more resilient to this type of degradation, but it’s a real issue for aging portable storage devices.

By far the most convenient method we can use to ensure our files are safe, is the cloud. While it’s true you do have different security concerns when saving things in this way, it’s undeniably the simplest, with most modern services by Microsoft, Apple and Google either being easy and cheap to set up, or simply baked into a device from the moment you start using it. While it’s sometimes a little difficult to use cloud storage for say, sharing a file with someone using another device ecosystem or opening a presentation on a machine you’re unfamiliar with, it’s definitely the most robust when it comes to storing the things most of us need to keep safe.

So let’s say you actually do have some files you’d like to safeguard forever. Some irreplaceable photos of family members, for example. One option is to go with one of a number of specialized cloud storage providers, which offer very long term storage as their focus. These can, unsurprisingly, be expensive though. Personally, I’d recommend a simpler and actually slightly less technical approach. In this scenario, I would purchase an external hard drive and save a copy of those photos to it, keeping a copy on your original device for day-to-day enjoyment. I’d then store this drive wherever you store your important documents, preferably away from their on-device duplicate copies and ideally in a fireproof location. Ultimately, there may be no true “forever” method of storing data, but we can certainly safeguard it, at minimum, for the foreseeable.