The Wirecutter has an article about photo scanning services. If any of you are familiar with photography, or even if you are not, what do you think of the idea of turning photos into digital files on DVD and hard drives on the assumption that these formats are more durable than paper?
Nothing is totally durable. If you want archival preservation, you should do it in a variety of media (including paper) and have multiple backups. Another wrinkle is that present formatting of digital media will not necessarily be readable in the future. For example, if you stored your photos on floppy disks, you probably lost them. On the other hand, hard copies (i.e. paper photos) will probably be scannable.
Go one step further and save the digital photos on the web, either in a cloud service like Dropbox or on your own personal web site.
The latter option is not as daunting as you might think if your only desire is to have page after page of photos. Also not that expensive. Many hosting services are $4-$5 per month with a free domain name of your choosing. And as long as there is an Internet you have your photos and can download them to whatever the current viable medium of the decade might be. Yes, your hosting service could bite the dust, but there should always be another to whom you can transfer (he says optimistically :/)
Nothing is totally durable. If you want archival preservation, you should do it in a variety of media (including paper) and have multiple backups.
are the only "durable media". That refers to multiple copies, in physically separate facilities.