In my opinion, burning a DVD or Blu-ray data disc is the most cost effective, stable solution if you are not shooting tape and can’t afford LTO. Once burned to the disc, the data isn’t go anywhere as long as you take care of the disc, which is easy to do. Just keep it in a cool, dry area out of the sun. One of those CD books works fine.
People always say, “Well you can scratch a disc,” as if it’s hard to take care of a disc. Statements like that have nothing to do with how well the product performs. That’s a statement about how well someone takes care of their stuff. Sure you can scratch a disc, but you can drop hard drives and lose tapes, but hard drive fail when you least expect them. So I don’t recommend that route if you’re not going to store your stuff on at least 2 drives.
In my opinion, DVD and Blu-ray data discs are the most cost effective right now.
