All games in one place? Steam? GOG?

Tell you what, I'll do you one better:

All my games on my PC.

But can I shove a NAS up my butt? No. Memory stick wins!
This is the part where I plug Adalia Fundamentals.

I tried to get information about that earlier, and at least to me the articles suggested that flash memories (like USB memory sticks):

- Are very good for long term archiving of data.

- Are bad for constant rewrites, ie. they will eventually become unusable if you keep writing stuff to them. That is why I stopped my experiment to run a Linux distro installation from a bit USB memory stick, as e.g. the swap file partition will be constantly rewritten, and other stuff too (temp files, browser caches and such, I guess). Otherwise that setup ran great though, except that it was a bit slow running as the USB memory stick (with the Linux installation) was on a USB 2.0 port.

So all in all, flash memory is very good for "save and forget" archiving, the data will stay there for a long time. But if you intend to update that archive constantly, then no.

That said, I don't use USB memories for long-term archival purposes because of their high cost per gigabyte, compared to e.g. HDDs.

We literally used to have this here. Portrait orientation box art that could be arranged.

They informed you wrong. Flash memory is based on an electric charge which in time degrades. Flash memory is the worst long term storage possible.

I used to be bugged about this but since I've started using Launchbox it's pretty much a non-issue for me (there are other front-ends you can use, but that's my personal choice). I just open the program, see my whole collection and it doesn't really matter what site I used to get which game because they're all right there in a grid and I can double-click on any of them and load them up as long as they're installed.

Interesting, since e.g. these articles tell a different story:

https://www.techwalla.com/articles/life-expectancy-of-a-usb-flash-drive http://www.flashbay.com/blog/usb-life-expectancy

The article also talks about "ten years", but in the comments section the site owner(?) even goes to say: Anyway, I don't use them for long time archiving mainly due to the cost, so whether that is true or not doesn't matter much to me. A one terabyte USB memory stick costs around 1000€ here, no thanks.

... and magnetic storage hard drives rely on spindle motors, which wear out in time... and CDs and DVDs (the writable/re-writable kind) rely on an organic data retention layer which degrades over time... and tape will demagnetize over time as well. Pick your poison :).

Always remember keep your data in at least two places at the same time and you should be reasonably safe regardless of what it is stored on.

P.S.: But you're right I guess. If I were a betting man (which I am, with my own data), I'd keep things for long term storage on lightly-used external hard drives nicely tucked somewhere at room temperature and away from any strong magnetic interference.
Better build yourself a DNA-based storage device - it's less painful. That double helix has more space than you'll ever need!

Total games, 4187!?!?!? :S

With the pile of shame being only 205 games, how did you get the time to finish the rest? :S

Ahhh i did not finish 90% of that mountain, just ticked "completed" for most. Collectionite syndrome... It is hundreds of Groupees + Humble and other PC bundles + Android few that get this crazy number; if i ever sort my list out with only what i like i may account to 300-500 "only", with consoles getting the lion share, i like to buy physical for those.