According to a survey conducted for SanDisk, 64% of adults in the US wouldn’t consider destroying their photo collections for $1 million. At the same time, the general public probably doesn’t spend nearly enough time and money ensuring the safety of those same photos. Well, SanDisk announced a new product today designed to help photos last at least as long as their owners do. It’s called the “Memory Vault”, and is a rugged flash drive that has the proven ability to preserve data uncorrupted — a big problem for ordinary hard drives — for up to 100 years. 8GB of storage will cost you $50, while 16GB is priced at $80.

SanDisk Memory Vault [SanDisk]

There’s a good chance the digital photos you’ve stored on hard drives and DVDs won’t outlive you, but what if there was a disc that could last forever? M-Disc, short for Millenial Disc, is a new type of disc that doesn’t suffer from natural decay and degradation like existing disc technologies, allowing you to store data safely for somewhere between “1000 years” and “forever”.

Existing disc technologies write data using an organic dye layer that begins to experience “data rot” immediately after it’s written, causing the disc to become unreadable after a certain amount of time. The M-Disc, on the other hand, actually carves your data into “rock-like materials” that are known to last for centuries, meaning there’s no data rot. Apparently NASA uses the discs to store data. Hopefully it becomes available and affordable soon…

Millenniata (via Engadget)