Medium term cold storage options?

mild_takes
2026-04-15T04:36:02Z

Increasingly I'm looking at my backup solution and I'm not totally happy. My "threat model" I guess is if the house burns down and we only make it out with the shirts on our backs. Alternatively if I get hit by a bus I'd like a backup of passwords and maybe some instructions for my wife.

Mostly irrelevant discussion on my current backup or lack of situation

Up until recently I had a VPS running syncthing as a central backup for all my devices but it kind of looks like that got randomly wiped or something... my plan up until that happened was that I have a computer in a locker at work that I occasionally fired up to sync my syncthing stuff. This has some issues, the big one being that it doesn't deal with bus factor.

My next plan (and the point of this topic) is to have some data stored offline in a safe deposit box at the bank or some other secure location and swap the data out at some interval like 6 months or 1 year. The stuff I REALLY care about is easily under 1gb and stuff I kind of care about (photos and that kind of thing) is < 1tb.

Also currently I'm paying for iCloud each month even though I've mostly left the mac-osphere. This is where my < 1tb of photos are. I intend to download all of that and stop paying for iCloud in the coming months.

TL;DR What are decent medium term cold storage options for < 1gb that I can be really sure will be good for several years (maybe 10 or 20 years at the extreme end) and is fairly cheap. I was thinking optical media but I'm kind of lost as to what specifically to get and how to not get conned by buying fake media (m discs). I (somewhat randomly) have an m disc drive in my computer but I don't know if thats overkill or not? My important stuff may even fit on a CD actually...

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