Dredging up a topic from the past, some old MM posters were worried about archival storage of precious genealogical information. At that time the consensus was the best solution was to stick the information/photo onto acid-free paper and use metal dyes for the ink. However as most people wanted to keep lots of family photos this was not a favoured option, and CD storage became the favoured medium of the day.
While Cloud storage MAY now have a place, it is hard to know if it drops into the archival category given Bitrot/commercial etc problems. So assuming the archival problem of reading CDs can be solved, they still look good, and it was then thought that Bluray may even be better.
The Canadian Government have had their own concerns and have investigated CD/DVD/BD disk storage. Surprisingly their study, shows BD disks to be a fairly carp medium ranking with DVD R/W. The gold old ‘Gold’ CDs or DVDs are far superior.
It seems the Canadian Government completely forgot any difficulties in reading the disks. Just twenty years on our own Government had huge problems in trying to find readers for the large laser disks used for the Millenium Doomsday archive!
Modern technology obviously has made life a lot easier, but I believe that a vanishingly few family photos that are taken today will survive until 2250. Conversely surviving photos of Victorian ancestors are still a moderately common occurrence today.
If you are interested in the topic I suggest research using the term ‘archival printing’, from my quick look, a laser printer on acid free paper is best for black & white, while an ink jet looks best for colour. link
Interestingly, some Kodak discussions suggest that using colour separation on an image and storing the separate colours as individual black and white images may be the best way to store and preserve colour images.
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