Well, M-Disc is out as bluray for about 2-3 months now. That's 50 GB on double-layer with a promised 1,000 years of lifetime. A practical problem will be (for me at least) that it will be hard to sue them in 500 years if it turns out that the medium doesn't last the promised 1,000 years.

Wow, I did not know about this. Actually I don't care about my data in 1000 years, even if it survives that long nobody is gonna be able to read it then. If it survives 100 years, or even just 50, it would be fine by me.
The wikipedia page has a link to an experimental evaluation of the DVD variant, which looks promising.
http://www.esystor.com/images/China_Lake_Full_Report.pdf

Oddly enough the only drives I've actually had issues with so far have been solid states. My first SSD died after about three month's of usage, and I have a Compact Flash card that for some reason dropped its main table on me randomly once (And forced a long annoying data recovery process to get the photos back), and I've been rather iffy about that one since.

I've had bad luck with SSDs as well. I've had two (from different manufacturers) die in as many years. Both were fine one day, and gone the next.

This is why I asked about faulty SSD firmwares, there was a period where most SSDs would fail suddenly for no reason because the firmware would glitch up and render the drive unusable.

I use cloud accounts that are synced locally. But I also do prefer backups that I control too - this was CDs/DVDs in the past, now it's mostly a USB stick, but I sometimes do a DVD (which has the advantage you can have a whole series of copies, which can be good if you lose a file but don't notice for months/years afterwards - this did happen to me once, but I found it on an old backup DVD).

I do get annoyed by people thinking that only storing on the cloud is a backup (e.g., Google's advertising from ChromeOS, saying you don't need to back them up - you do).

And for anyone thinking that surely nothing would ever go wrong with data on Google cloud, here is a recent real world example: my ISP, Virgin Media, told customers with 7 days' notice that if they used a Virgin Media email as a login for a Google account, they had to change it to another address, or be locked out of their accounts. Even more worryingly, this seems to be due to Google themselves (supposedly because VM's email is run by Google, and it's no longer compatible with Google accounts). Users who missed the email, were out of the country without Internet access, dismissed it as a scam (reasonable, given how it was worded), had it caught in their spam folder etc, wouldn't even have a chance to do this.

That's the type of stuff that worries me.

And on the note of Chrome OS, NOPE!

That is like worse case scenario. It's almost useless when you can use a tablet for that type of thing.

I use a laptop for offline stuff, so to have a laptop taking up extra desk space (or lap space) when all it can do is browse the internet, I just don't get it. Surely not going to be rendering a Pixar movie on Chrome OS, or developing the latest Metal Gear Soilid.

That goes back to the issue with cloud backup. Who is going to back up all of the assets to make the latest Transformers movie on a cloud service? If that service goes down, somebody is loosing their job ASAP, and talk about the money lost!

I honestly feel like storing all my data on DVDs would be a mite bit crazy. That's over 200 4.8GB DVDs just to store a terabyte of data. That's 7 pounds of pure DVDs, almost a foot high (based on some random website). They just don't have the density for viable large-scale backup. Even at smaller scales, flash drives are more efficient in my book.

If you're serious about backing up all your stuff, the best solution is to have multiple vectors. Personally, I've never had a hard drive fail, but since that is a real threat, a RAID system of some kind coupled with a remote backup of some sort (cloud or another RAIDed machine) should be all you need. The odds of both your local store AND remote store simultaneously dying in a horrible accident are about as high as the odds of a tornado hitting your papers anyway. Unless a massive EMP destroys everyone's electronics, in which case your tax records are no longer terribly important in the grand scheme of things.

Because the zombies are coming.

In the 90's I had hard drives that just outlasted their usefulness, but in the beginning of the 2000's, I had so much hard drive failures that I started questioning how viable hard drives would be, with the failure rate I experienced back then. One of the drives was even subject to a massive class action lawsuit in USA because of its massive failure rate. I was fortunate though... The hard drives started 'clicking', while the whole system stalled as a pre-warning that it was going to die really soon. That enabled me to copy all the data off the drive before I stopped using the defective drive. I also had a drive that died, but if I cooled it down a bit, it lasted long enough that I could start it up for a little while.

Oh, and about SSD's that LennyLen is talking about, one colleague of mine had a drive that stopped working in aeroplanes, and ended up with a nice 'sector 0 not found message', losing all his data. I am not sure if he decided to send the drive for recovery or not, but losing data is a really bad feeling, even if the data is not really that important.

Edit: (Added this here since I discovered that I had the last post anyway, despite GameDev telling me there were new posts here.)

I do get annoyed by people thinking that only storing on the cloud is a backup (e.g., Google's advertising from ChromeOS, saying you don't need to back them up - you do).

That is a bit ironic, since if you ask anyone on the Google Drive team, they will clearly tell you that Google Drive is NOT a backup service. In fact Google won't take any responsibility for any data you lose in the cloud, for whatever reason, stating that it is YOUR responsibility to make sure you have enough redundancy on your data.

If you think about it, it is pretty obvious that you have to take care of your own backup strategy, not rely solely on one single backup strategy.

Ironically we are talking in a instrument tech forum about "the cloud" right now.

Several different folks have posted stories that they have lost data from Amazon, Microsoft, Google and many other "remote file hosting" sites.

It has been generally agreed that storing sensitive / critical data locally is a safer bet than a remote host.

It has been generally agreed that storing sensitive / critical data locally is a safer bet than a remote host.

Except that isn't. What is generally agreed upon is that if you want to me safe, backup your data to multiple locations.