You don’t have a lot of options if you want to preserve sure your data (your photos for example) for many years without any maintenance.
Data stored on hard drives and flash memory like SD cards will degrade within a decade or two. Cloud storage like Google Drive requires the continued maintenance of an account and long-term reliability is uncertain. Larger amounts of data may require payment. Data being stolen or hacked is another concern.
The cheapest solution for long-term storage I could find was optical storage in the form of M-discs. Those are Blue-ray discs designed to last centuries. Reading and writing them requires the right Blue-ray drive. A pack of 10 discs with a capacity of 25 GB each costs around $25. This is enough storage capacity for my purposes. Larger capacity discs up to 100 GB are available, but writing them requires specialized software that I didn’t want to install. Reading and writing M-discs requires a compatible Blue-ray drive that costs around $120, which means that the entire setup costs $145 before tax.
I’m planning to store the discs together with the drive, which will make reading them in the future easier. This setup assumes future computers will be compatibility with the drive’s USB-C connector. It also assumes that a driver for the Blu-ray drive will be available for download. Both of those seem quite likely unless there’s some catastrophe.
Nehaveigur 