Long Term Personal Data Storage

BeanBagKing writes: "Yesterday I set out in search of a way to store my documents, videos, and pictures for a long time without worrying about them. This is stuff that I may not care about for years, I don't care where it is, or if it's immediately available, so long as when I do decide to get it, it's there. What did I come up with? Nothing. Hard Drives can fail or degrade. CD's and DVD's I've read have the same problem over long periods of time. I don't want to pay yearly rent on a server or backup/storage solution. I could start my own server, but that goes back to the issue of hard drives failing, not to mention cost. Tape backups aren't common for personal backups, making far future retrieval possibly difficult, not to mention low storage capacity of tape drives. I've thought about buying a bunch of 4GB thumb drives, I've had some of those for years and even sent a few threw washers and driers and had the data survive.

What can /. suggest for me? My requirements are simple. It must be stable, lasting for decades if possible, and must be as inexpensive as possible. I'm not looking to start my own national archive, I have less than 500GBs, just save things important to me."