Description

Long-term storage refers to indefinite storage of information. This typically happens by backing up the detected incident from the short-term storage to another media form and storing the information for a longer term by not allowing it to be overwritten or erased. Some users refer to this as archived storage.

The media for long-term storage can be the same as short-term storage, or different. The current dominant storage technology is still magnetic hard disk drives, although solid state electronic storage in the form of flash drives, SD cards and solid state drives (SSD) are becoming more popular due to their affordability and capacity increase. Optical drives, in the form of CD-ROMs, DVDs, or even Blue-Ray disks are slowly becoming obsolete.

Long-term storage, in theory, is not really indefinite as eventually the media will lose its properties and can no longer be read. A hard drive may lose its magnetic particle polarization after many years, and the same can be said about optical or solid state media, although the numbers of years that it would take for this to occur has not yet been ascertained.