Some of them were from my dad back in ww2 and stuff. Currently got a external cd/dvd drive that I am going to return. I have external hard drives crap out on me and USB’s do the same. I plan I keeping the disc and also putting them on USB but was wondering if there is something more concrete? With that said I do not know how to use the cloud and honestly don’t trust it.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/
3-2-1 is the way.
I have over 300GB of photos, digital, scanned, etc. I have a working master copy of them on my computer, plus two alternating local copies on local network backups, plus quarterly rotating offsite backups to a safe deposit box. This protects against bit rot, data corruption, accidental deletion and short term incremental data loss.
In all the years I’ve used this setup (around 25 now), I’ve only ever lost one chunk of photos, which I didn’t realize had got erased until after I’d already rotated the quarterly backups twice. Thankfully I’d also shared edited versions of that set with a friend, so while I was never able to recover the raw files, I at least got the edited copies back.