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I used to back up files to DVD, but I found that the DVDs really didn't last very long, and were very delicate.
When I upgraded my computer I opted to go DVD drive free.
Now I've been using USB sticks for cold data storage. The price per gigabyte is acceptable for me. But will the data last on there?
Will I be able to plug in my old USB stick in 30 or 40 years to look at my old photos?
I don't think USB compatibility in the future should be that much of a concern to you. On worst case, if USB backward compatibility is dropped at some point you will see it come and have plenty of time to react. I'm sure will be able to move your data to a brand new, let's say, 4TB USB stick that will sell for less than 20$ at that time.
The part that I cannot answer is how reliable are those USB sticks for long term storage? Were there any studies made on this? Another concern I have with USB sticks is, for instance, if the USB controller breaks then you cannot access even 1 bit of your data. At least with DVDs you can almost always recover at least parts of it.
As far as the ability to read and write data, they should be theoretically good for a very long time - it depends on how many writes you do per day. Assuming you do just one backup per day, the normal quoted 100,000 writes indicates that your life of the drive would theoretically be 273 years or so. As far as writing to the drive and storing it, various sites quote the manufacturers as saying it should retain data for 5-10 years before the charge dissipates. More importantly, since the industry is on a severe quick update cycle, I doubt USB will be around in even 10 years, much less longer. Think about the cassette port, DIN keyboard, VGA port, parallel, serial, SCSI 25, SCSI 50... All used to be normal ports, now they are hard find on a new computer
Putting aside the cost argument for necessary redundancy I would suggest cloud backup. Any service has to be configured correctly to be effective. However, I would comfortable relying on Google, Amazon, Sugar Sync, Dropbox or Sky Drive. I have used Google Photos / Picasa for backing up photos of my daughter since she was born.
No data should be backed up in the same location (in this case your home) the original files are kept. USB or DVDs are not great options for backup because presumably they are in the drawer of the desk your computer sits on. That said, they could be damaged, lost, stolen or destroyed. If you are really serious about backing these files up without using a cloud service you should make multiple copies and keep them at separate locations such as friends or relatives homes or a safety deposit box.
