Best way to store a small amount of data?

There are several ways to store small data for infinite amount of time.
1, cloud storage - goto Box Online File Storage and sign up for a free 5gb space. follow direction on this page to map the drive to your windows explorer Mount box.net account in Windows Explorer Once initial setup is done, you can use it like a normal drive but don't have to worry about drives crash or burn down along with your house.
2, attach the files you want to save and email it to yourself. You can also zip or rar multiple files with password protection so no one can ever see it. yahoomail and gmail are pretty good for data storage. As long as you keep the email account open, you'll have access to those files.
3, burn several copies of data on CD and DVD and store them all over the house.
4, If you have any devices that take storage media such as camera phones, digital cameras, mp3 players, you can store the data onto those medias as well.
5, As others have said, invest in some USB flash drives and store the data on there.

For your ancient data access needs, you can buy USB 5.25" or 3.5" floopy drives, use DOSBox to run extremely old operating systems like DOS and Windows from the 1980's For old programs to open them, you can download some old programs from Oldversion.com

 

I have seen businesses like this go away (along with all your data) with little or no notice. I wouldn't trust any of them.

 

According to this, it's unlimited, and other people do the exact same thing.

 

box.com and dropbox.com are pretty big and legitimate cloud storage company that service other enterprise companies. I highly doubt they'll go away overnight. It's not like FBI, FTC or DOJ's gonna go knocking on their door like megaupload. Even if they're closing their doors you would hear something about it. In fact, Steve Jobs wanted to buy dropbox but Houston refused. There are so many other legitimate cloud storage companies that offer 2-5GB free storage. You can easily sign up a few of them as backups. There's no way in hell that ALL of them would close their doors in the same day unless the Earth gets hit by a Texas sized meteor. If that's the case, retrieving your data would be the last thing on your mind.

I got 50GB of free storage during box.com promotion a couple of months ago.

Here's the directions for mapping box.com as network drive on a mac Map Box.net drive on Mac and Windows

 

When I saw the topic I was going to suggest using something like gmail or yahoo mail - it is easy and free and I was actually going to suggest using both - that way the chances of it not being recoverable would be minuscule. I was surprised that it took 2 pages before someone suggested it.

On a related note - the company Evernote has a great service that essentially gives you a big repository for digital data - you can dump in all sorts of files and even things like camera phone photos directly - then it allows you to pull it out as needed and search it in many different ways. I do not use it for crucial things, but it great for all of the little stuff - reminders, my next great idea, brainfarts, etc.

 

Only 58 MB? You can easily fit that on a CD (a typical CD holds 700 MB, at least the ones I have do). Also, if they're just pictures (as opposed to, say, also spreadsheets, text documents, etc.), you can use Flickr or Picassa or any of a number of similar services.

 

No question about that (plus, just like floppy disc drives are no longer made, I predict in the future CD drives are no longer standard, either). But it is the safest because if it's not on a CD R/W, once it's on there it could never be accidentally deleted.

So the question isn't Flash Drive or CD; it's besides Flash Drive, should you put it on CD? I'd say yes.

 

If you are going to burn it to optical media, I would suggest the use of higher quality media. Verbatim makes some better-than-the-cheap-crap disks, but not so great that you pay out the nose.

And what media to use? Well, as of today CD's, DVD's, and BlueRay are all backwards compatible. You can play a CD in a BlueRay player, but not a BlueRay in CD player. But we are at the point where CD's are dying. I would suggest using DVD-R disks. You can store 4.7GB on there and you won't come close to that with a few MB's of images. However it will be playable in most things and wont be the next thing to be obsoleted, that will be CD's.