>CD-R is the best digital format for archiving.
And now you have to store hundreds of CDs somewhere in a climate-controlled manner
You're gonna get what ... 100 (maybe? probably more like 50-60 (if they're high-quality images)) photos per CD? Say you [only] have a 1000 photos - you need 10-20 CDs
Ramp that number up to what seems to be a lot more common (say 100+ "keepers" per month), and you're burning a CD every month just to keep pace, or about a dozen a year
And that is just photos - haven't gotten into video yet (an increasingly-common file type)
Then you also need a way to read them later (integral CD/DVD drives are not especially common any more on most systems - so you also need to keep extra hardware handy)
And that external hardware is going to need devices that connect to it - USB-A is still pretty common ... but it's becoming less so
Anyone remember Firewire? SCSI? I do ... but they have all gone the way of the dodo bird
CDs degrade over time - commercially-produced less than home-burned...but they're distinctly not permanent media
If you move to DVD-R, you expand the number of images you can store from ~50-100 per disc to ~400-800 ... so you're burning one (just for photos) every quarter to half year - just to keep up
Or you can pay Apple $10/mo for 2TB[0] of storage
Or BackBlaze a $100/year[1] for "unlimited" storage (there's a limit somewhere ... but it's pretty high) for a single user
If you want to run your own archiving service/process ... be my guest (I do it by running NextCloud on a server) - but it is not for everyone (I also pay for OneDrive via my 365 subscription and the 2TB iCloud service for all our family devices (laptops, iPads, iPhones))
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