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[Electrovellum]

I'm thinking about making a hard printed copy of everything held within my FH tree & media folder as a secure historical family record. There are lots of reports available, but any advice on the best approach to achieve this would be very welcome. I would also make a DVD copy.

[tatewise]

Depending on the size of your project that could be a lot of paper!
It would also involve a mammoth effort to re-enter all that detail.
IMO the best reports to include everything would be the Publish > Record Detail Reports and include a report for each type of record covering every record of that type, i.e. all Individuals, all Families, all Notes, all Sources, etc, etc.

You may also want to think about customised Diagram, Report, Query, Plugin, Fact Set, etc, etc, settings.

Have you reviewed the FHUG Knowledge Base Backup and Recovery advice?
Especially consider the Making a Safe Backup section near the end.

I'd recommend focussing on 'off-site' digital copies rather than paper which is susceptible to many forms of deterioration.

[Mark1834]

IMO, paper backups are not practical for anything over a few dozen records, but I find Family Group Sheets a useful reference for key families. Mind you, I rarely print them and mostly read on the screen!

The starting point for any backup strategy is the rule of three. Three copies, on three types of media, in three locations. Today, a USB hard disk or local network storage are most commonly copy two, and copy three is cloud storage.

Please do bear in mind that home-produced DVD disks are not a reliable backup method. They are not nearly as robust as commercially produced disks and much more susceptible to corruption.

[Electrovellum]

Thank you both. It is a real issue. I agree that the volume of paper is probably prohibitive. I have to be realistic though. Interest in family ancestors may well skip a generation or more and seeing the advances in technology makes a choice of backup media difficult. Using the cloud or indeed an existing family tree research company is subject to companies closing down. I'd hate to think of all that info being destroyed.
Decisions, decisions!

[davidf]

...
Interest in family ancestors may well skip a generation or more and seeing the advances in technology makes a choice of backup media difficult. ...
I'd hate to think of all that info being destroyed.
Decisions, decisions!

To ensure the longevity of your work it is not just a question of a suitable back up, but some means of ensuring that someone in a generation as yet known/born wants to pick up your work.

Perhaps a book (real - look at Print on Demand - like Lulu) containing a number of well written family histories will catch the interest. You could print a number of copies for each of your grand-children and great nephews/nieces - that should ensure some longevity. You may even find that your county record office would take a copy. A book is likely to be longer lasting than a box full of print-out!

An appendix with a machine readable version of the GEDCOM file could then provide them with a means to "reconstruct" your work in what-ever is the then current technology. GEDCOM may be well past it's sell by date by then but it is almost human readable which means a conversion program could be written to enable the data to be read into whatever the technology is.

[waveydavey2016]

I don't want this to sound depressing, but it will! I have loved family history for years and have built a database of all my ancestors, all their siblings and all their descendants. Every time I've made a discovery, it has pleased/thrilled? me and I have tried to explain what I have found to my family. They've never been that interested - which I'm sad about and fine about in equal measure. However, I have long resigned myself to the realisation that no-one will carry the database on after I'm gone. So my point about it is: I will carry on updating/adding to my tree and, yes certainly backing it up. But maybe this might apply to you: there is no point trying to print it out (in my case) as there will in all probability be no-one to hand it to!

[Jane]

One possibility is to leave your research data to an appropriate Family History society, if no one is interested in your Family group.

I have been working on my plan to produce some more stories of individuals in my tree along with historical context, I find people are happy to read a story rather than trying to absorb all the information I gathered to write the story.

Just printing out the information (I think my current data would be around 10,000 pages) would not really be very usable as others have already said.