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Probably want to encode it on a WORM tape. (Suggestion used LTO drives on eBay)
Then store it in the centre of a sealed medium ~~iron~~ galvanized metal box filled with silica. (Take care not to damage the tape, without trapping moisture.)
I'd imagine it would work well if you can keep the hardware to use it functional.
Most of those ideas are not feasible with a very low budget you want because eventually rot will get to the hard drive and thus making the contents unreadable. So -- depending on what you want to preserve -- it's either writable media or printed out in acid-free paper or in microdot negative film, and of those methods, only print media -- written, typed, from a copier, or with a laser printer -- might as well be cheap.
Don't bury it. And don't count on ten years. Thirty years guarantees the media won't be physically compatible with future devices. How would you read a floppy disk from 1995 today? You'd be able to find a USB floppy drive, probably, online. Good luck having the disk be in a format that a modern OS understands. You'd need specialty software for that.
Get two spinning disk drives from major brands like Western Digital or Toshiba (not Seagate, for sure). Get different brands to reduce risk of failure from a manufacturing issue (as in, two from the same batch are likely to have the same failure if there was a production issue).
Send one somewhere abroad where it can be stored in a safe deposit box (hopefully, you know someone who lives in a free-er country). Plan to exchange it with a freshly written drive every three years. Go back and forth like this, completely rewriting the data each time to minimize the chances of bit-rot (look up this term to understand why you're rewriting and exchanging the drives).
This will also address files formats that evolve and eventually become incompatible with future software (thinking proprietary things, not plain text, jpegs, or standardized media files). I did something similar having a family member store music that I recorded (my own, not ripped CDs) in a different state in case of natural disaster at home.
All of this can be done pretty cheap. $200 bucks should cover both drives and at least a couple of years of physical storage at a bank. International shipping will probably be the biggest cost, especially over time.
Holy shit toshiba hard drives are fucking awful, and floppies are still not hard to read today.
I swear it's half the reason people are mad at Synology. There is no way to buy a "Synology" drive without the chance of getting a Toshiba drive, just return and reorder until you get decent drives.
Drop a thumb stick (mechanical failure) into a plastic zip-lock in a vacuum (oxygen) then into a metal thermos mug with water (pressure and radiation) then dig it really deep (accidential discovery and weather). By the time it deteriorates you'd have problems finding USB interfaces to plug it in. The location itself is largely irrelevant, but I'd recommend some place far from human-occupied places.
The authoritarian state problem isn't solveable, but you can defend it by obscurity, like not leaving a trace of thinking about this info cache, or leaving too many of these caches to reliably dig up all of them.
If it's a Type-A, add a little Type-A to Type-C converter in the bag as well. Just in case.
As someone who has lost hard drive in the past, encrypt and back up to the cloud.
It is the safest way.
Interesting thread.Would be interested to learn from commenters which storage media is most impervious to digital rot.
The standard (and tested for decades) answer is tape.
M-Disc might also be an alternative.
Tape needs to be stored in a controlled environment. Heat and humidity can degrade tapes. Usually you’d transfer the data to a new tape every 5 to 10 years just to be safe.
tnx for the reply, I suspected as much.
Does it need to be physical? I'd expect data on a well funded S3 account or a tar snap account to live 30 years
I wouldn't trust cloud storage in case of a dictatorship.
You can not.
There is not a safe and reliable way to store digital information for such big time span while off.
The maximum you could get is some programmable eeprom and usually no vendor will bet that the information is accesible after 15 years while power off.
But once this is said, there a re few things you con do to maximize your chances.
From the technology point of view everything that is using old nand-flash technology should give you decent chances after 15 years power off. To ensure better probabilities use a fs with possibilities of storing recovery /parity/ checksum data. And try to store in a environment with minimum changes in temp, humidity and radiation (electromagnetic, solar).
And cross some fingers