The best way to store photos long term is three copies on at least two kinds of storage, with one copy in another building: for most photographers, two hard drives at home and one copy in the cloud. Then two habits that matter as much as the hardware: check the copies once a year, and move everything to new drives about every five years.
No single storage medium lasts forever on its own, and none needs to. What keeps photos for decades is having more than one copy and noticing when one goes bad.
TL;DR: Keep originals (RAW plus any edited exports you care about) in three places: a working drive, a second hard drive at home, and an offsite copy (cloud or a drive elsewhere). Hard drives are the cheapest per TB and keep data well unpowered; SSDs are better for travel than for a drawer; cloud is the easiest offsite copy. Once a year, plug in every archive drive and check the files against checksums. Every five years or so, migrate to new drives. Keep a plain folder structure so the files make sense without any app.
What Should You Store?
The originals. RAW files from the camera, or the original JPEG/HEIC from a phone. Everything else can be recreated from them.
Your edits, in a form that survives the software. Lightroom and Capture One edits live in a catalog or in sidecar files; without the app they're gone. For photos that matter, also export a full-resolution JPEG or TIFF of the final edit. In 30 years, a JPEG is the format most likely to still open.
The catalog. If you use Lightroom Classic, the .lrcat file and its folder hold every rating, keyword, and collection. Back it up alongside the photos; our Lightroom guide covers how.
Whether to convert RAW files to DNG is a long-running debate. DNG is an openly documented format, which is an argument for long-term storage, but camera makers' RAW formats are well supported by open-source tools today. Either is fine; what matters more is keeping copies.
Where to Store Photos Long Term: The Options
| Storage | Cost per TB (approx.) | Lasts | Good for | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Desktop hard drive | About $20-40, once | About 5 years before you should migrate | The main archive copies | Mechanical failure, drops |
| Portable SSD | About 5x a hard drive | Long when powered; leaks charge unpowered | Travel, working copy | A hot drawer for years |
| NAS (with Btrfs or ZFS) | Drives plus the box | Drives replaceable one by one | A home archive several devices use | It's still one copy, in one place |
| Cloud bucket (Backblaze B2, Wasabi) | About $7-8 per month | As long as you pay | The offsite copy | Monthly cost forever, slow full restore |
| Consumer cloud (iCloud, Google Photos, Amazon Photos) | Plan-based | As long as the account is in good standing | Phone photos, a convenience copy | Not a backup on its own; account lockouts |
| M-DISC Blu-ray | High per TB, 100GB per disc | Rated for centuries in accelerated tests | A small set of irreplaceable photos | Slow, low capacity, needs a drive that reads it in 2050 |
Hard drive prices are from our cheapest storage per GB breakdown, which tracks them as they move.
Hard drives: the main archive
Desktop hard drives cost the least per TB of anything you can buy, and they store data magnetically, so they don't lose it sitting unpowered the way SSDs can. For a photographer adding a few TB a year, two matching desktop drives (one at home, one rotated offsite or kept as a second copy) are the core of the archive. How long they last, and what kills them, is in how long external hard drives last.
SSDs: great to work from, worse in a drawer
Portable SSDs survive being carried around far better than hard drives, which makes them the right working and travel drive. As a long-term archive they're the weaker choice: flash memory slowly loses charge without power, and the industry standard only requires a worn consumer SSD to hold data for a year unpowered at 30°C. Fine as one copy you use often; not the copy that sits untouched for five years.
Cloud: the easiest offsite copy
An offsite copy protects against fire, theft, and flood at home. The cloud is the simplest way to get one. Two kinds:
- Storage buckets (Backblaze B2, Wasabi, Cloudflare R2) store exactly what you upload, in your folder structure, for a few dollars per TB per month. Prices are compared in our B2 vs Wasabi vs R2 guide.
- Photo services (iCloud Photos, Google Photos, Amazon Photos) are convenient, especially for phone pictures. Amazon Photos includes unlimited full-resolution photo storage, RAW included, for Prime members (video is limited to 5GB). Treat these as one copy, not the archive: syncing services mirror deletions, and an account lockout takes everything at once. Cloud storage is not a backup has real cases.
M-DISC: for the few photos that must outlast everything
M-DISC is a recordable Blu-ray (and DVD) with an inorganic recording layer, sold as archival media. Verbatim's 100GB M-DISC BD-R XL discs are rated for several hundred years based on accelerated aging tests. That's an extrapolation, not decades of real-world data, but optical discs don't have motors or charge to lose.
The practical limits are capacity (a 2TB photo library is 20 discs) and the drive: you need a BD-XL burner to write them and something that reads Blu-ray to get them back. M-DISC makes sense for a curated set, like family photos or a portfolio, not a working archive.
How to Organize Photos So They Make Sense in 20 Years
Software comes and goes. A plain folder structure keeps the archive readable without any particular app:
Photos/
2026/
2026-03-14 Lisbon/
2026-06-02 Miller Wedding/
Year, then date and a short name. Keep the same structure on every copy so that comparing copies, and restoring from one, is simple. Put keywords and ratings in the catalog or in XMP sidecar files next to the RAWs, so they travel with the photos.
Check the Copies Every Year
Storing photos long term fails quietly. A drive that hasn't been plugged in for three years might not spin up, or might return a few damaged files without any error. Once a year:
- Plug in every archive drive.
- Check the files against a list of checksums made when you copied them. Our bit rot guide shows how with two Terminal commands; on a desktop hard drive, a check runs at about 1 to 2 hours per TB.
- Replace any damaged file from another copy.
- Note anything that's getting slow or noisy.
Migrate to New Drives About Every Five Years
Hard drives wear out, interfaces change (FireWire and USB-A drives are already awkward on new Macs), and new drives hold more per dollar. Every five years or so, copy each archive drive to a new, larger one, check the copy, and only then retire the old drive. Merging three old 2TB drives onto one new 8TB drive also cuts how many drives you have to keep track of. Before merging, our free duplicate file finder can compare the old drives in the browser and show which shoots exist on more than one, so you copy each of them once.
That tracking is the part photographers find hardest after a few migrations: which shoot is on which drive, and is there a second copy. Tusk keeps that record per file, checks every copy with a BLAKE3 hash, and shows it even for drives sitting unplugged in a drawer.
FAQ
Keep three copies on at least two kinds of storage, with one copy offsite: typically two hard drives at home and one cloud copy. Check every copy once a year against checksums, replace damaged files from another copy, and migrate to new drives about every five years. Keep the original files plus full-resolution exports of edits you care about.
It's a good offsite copy but shouldn't be the only one. Storage buckets like Backblaze B2 keep exactly what you upload for a monthly fee. Photo services like iCloud, Google Photos, and Amazon Photos are convenient but sync deletions, and an account problem can lock you out of everything at once. Pair the cloud with copies on drives you own.
Hard drives, for copies that sit unused for long periods. They're much cheaper per TB and don't lose data while unpowered the way flash can. SSDs are better for drives you carry and use often. Whichever you use, plug archive drives in at least once a year and check the files.
The files last as long as the drive does, and a drive kept cool and dry usually works for many years. Plan to replace archive drives about every five years, check them once a year, and always keep a second copy, because any single drive can fail without warning.
For a small set of irreplaceable photos, yes. M-DISC discs are rated for several hundred years in accelerated aging tests and have no electronics or moving parts. But each disc holds at most 100GB, writing needs a BD-XL burner, and you'll need a working Blu-ray reader decades from now. For a large library, hard drives plus cloud are more practical.