It’s 2026, and everything has skyrocketed in cost for obvious reasons, and computer parts are no exception. Hard drive space is no longer cheap. In these trying times, I’m going to try archiving from almost zero knowledge.
My primary goal with archiving is to alleviate cost and data loss risk by creating custom notions of hot and cold storage.
Anything I don’t access frequently will be relegated to a CD, DVD, or Bluray disc. Part of this effort is that I will make physical space in my home for a disc binder and allow this to occupy physical space.
Getting started
I had a spindle of DVD-R discs I bought several years ago during an Amazon Prime Day for dirt cheap. I was messing around with the notion of preserving my copies of games I had purchased from GOG, but hard drives were relatively cheap and GOG installers were easy to share. I additionally have an external DVD drive for some physical copies of PC games I still have from the old days.
The spindle of DVD-Rs I had are specified as DVD-5, meaning they’re limited to 4.7gb of storage per disc. I purchased a new spindle of DVD+R discs that are specified as DVD-9, giving me roughly 8.5gb per disc.
Since I missed the boat on Bluray burners/drives, I purchased the archgon External USB 3.0 4K Blu-Ray Writer and a small spindle of Bluray discs.
I also grabbed this Amazon Basics CD/DVD Storage Binder with a capacity of 400 discs. The 25-disc binder that I got at Best Buy over a decade ago is not sufficient for this.
With these purchases, I’ve got basic reading & writing tools, discs, and a physical container. It’s gonna run me about $200+ at the time of posting
The plan so far
The prime target for cold storage is archived (and “archived”) video games. So far, this is every playable game that I’ve saved locally that I’ve deemed worthy of keeping out of interest.
This is somewhat of a mixed bag because it partially includes my GOG library but not all of it. This could narrow down as I go through it, as I’ve trimmed down my library a bit over the years.
Another part of my library is also artbooks, docs, utilities, and so on, but those are a smaller than expected part of my library. I’m likely going to have to figure out what they came up with in that odd period in the 2010s where disc drives for PCs were going out of favor, since I think you can use discs as bootleg hard drive platters where they’re (typically) read only storage devices.
The first part of my cold storage plan is to review every PC game I have stored that occupies 8gb of storage and determine if I’m going to keep it at all. Some games I already have on Steam but are no longer available on Steam, such as Transformers Devastation. Other games I’m willing to part with because I trust in my access to Steam or GOG for playing them, which includes games like the Atelier series or STALKER.
I’ll be preserving every RTS game I have archived since it’s an awkwardly beloved genre: the general public doesn’t really care about the games within as much, so there’s genuine risk of them vanishing, but there are still niche audiences for them.
The next phase of this plan would involve figuring out how I’d preserve console games. I can justify a PC game that’s about 1gb or even 500mb living on a DVD-5, but console games are a different kettle of fish. My personally curated console game choices between the NES, SNES, Gameboy, Gameboy Advance, and N64 can fit onto a DVD-5. The average game size for a GBA game is anywhere between 16mb and 32mb.
As stated, I want to have hot/cold storage where I have to worry about less hardware for things that aren’t in the forefront of my mind. The more I can trust a disc to hold my data for 10-15 years, the easier it becomes to plan ahead for “renewing” storage options, weather economic downturns, and generally preserve games as it becomes easier for old versions to be replaced by remasters and publishers to stop caring.
Overall I have a reasonably high amount of trust in Valve where my games/licenses won’t vanish, even if a publisher yoinks a game from the Steam store (they’ve made good on this for Stalin vs Martians, Transformers Devastation, etc.). Valve has made a lot of offhand comments about how they don’t intend to go down anytime soon, but if there ever was a catastrophic failure, they’d figure out a system for enabling their customers to pick up the slack in preserving their game libraries.
Archiving my media also gives me an idea of, if it came down to it, what I consider precious and what I wouldn’t miss. It’s easy to fall into the “hoarding” part of data hoarding where you’re just saving things willy-nilly without a goal or purpose outside of the notion that “this media could be gone one day!”
Future goal
If this works out, I’d want to see about doing this kind of thing for documents. I think the thing about documents is that they tend to either be small text-based files (tex, pdf, epub) and textual pseudo-databases like Excel workbooks that tend not to occupy more than a CD’s 700-ish megabytes of space, or they’re a myriad of photos (.jpg + RAW file) where one folder could easily take up a DVD-9’s 8gb.
In the end, it might simply be more efficient to have an external portable hard drive just for documents and ebooks. It can be stowed away and mostly forgotten about. In fact, I managed to finish such a project before hardware prices surged where I created external hard drive backups of my music, photos, tv, movies, and anime.
However, I think one of the appeals of having cold storage for things like movies, anime, anything you’d watch or semi-passively consume, is that it’s accessible pretty quickly without an internet connection and has all the same long-term storage benefits. It’s nice to have all this stuff on a Plex/Jellyfin server, but a server depends on a network connection and you’ll have to manage your server by refreshing all of the hard drives every 5-ish years.
I think I’d want to have cold storage/disc viewership options for my favorite movies, tv, anime, etc. where I can just pop a disc into a player and start watching. I think this would incur its own portion of effort because there’s a whole rabbit hole in creating things like DVD/Bluray menus, but I think at that point I’ll have some kind of solution in place for my cold storage and hopefully will have rode out the insane prices on hardware.