External USB drives (Western Digital – big name manufacturer) are currently £69 delivered for 80Gb from Maplin (almost cheaper than internal), and if you go to their stores you can get another fiver off with a printed voucher from the current sale leaflet (available in store). These drives are easily transferrable to future computers, and of course, if USB became extinct, the contents could be copied to a future storage device via an existing USB PC. Why does anyone bother with discs?
HD’s are fast and easy but expensive £0.90 per GB (as above; I use 300GB Firewire & USB 2.0 Maxtors at about £0.50/GB from ebuyer) and delicate. They are incredible, high precission pieces of engineering but do go wrong and are vulnerable to emf.
Optical media is cheap at about £0.05/GB but bulky and vulnerable to physical damage as well as unproven degradation with time.
Other backup media such such as tapes have their pros and cons.
Film and pints, lets not go there beyond they can fade or the colour balance can change…
Summary: no method or archiving is guarenteed or certain
What to do?
Spread your risk in proportion to the value of the data:
Use HD, optical and physical.
Use md5 check sums to ensure the data is not corrupted.
Store copies at remote locations; a backup is no good if that burns in the same fire that trashed the PC!
Store copies in controlled environments – its normally heat and damp that do damage
Copy the files onto new media every x years.
Convert obsolete formats to new standards whenever possible (old programs and OS’s are not always compatible with new hardware or OS’s – try using at ‘big’ HD with Win98)
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