store every picture in every format you can possibly save it in starting from your raw file and working your way down to jpeg.
That's a legitimate solution, I guess. Sounds annoying to take the time to do, but if you could set up a batch process it would be a reasonable and clever solution.
Floppy were one time as a standard, most people use that as a tool to store stuff in the past. Backup important data on it as well.
Yes, and BECAUSE it was such a widely used standard, floppy disks are not only still in use right now, but they also still manufacture floppy drives that you can plug into your modern computer via USB for less than $25. Here's four of them for sale right here:
Floppy Drives, Floppy Disk Drives, External Floppy Drive - Newegg.com
And here's a 10 pack of brand new floppy disks for sale:
Amazon.com: Sony 10MFD2HDLF 2HD 3.5-Inch IBM Formatted Floppy Disks (10-Pack): Electronics
This is a perfect
perfect example of what I said right at the very start: Files in standard, worldwide formats will inevitably give you years and years and years of time to switch over at your convenience, with dozens or hundreds of different commercially available tools and options for doing so and absolutely no threat of not being able to find a conversion solution, and no threat of it requiring any significant hassle. If you still had a stack of old 3.5 floppies in your cupboard, assuming they hadn't disintegrated, you could go buy a drive manufactured a month ago, have it delivered in 2 days, and put them on your Windows 7 hard drive with plug and play drivers, no problem.
The best format for me to store my photos now is RAW because it contains all the information
DNG not only stores every scrap of the same information, but it also has the ability to store even more than RAW does. In addition to being designed to be easily compatible, unlike RAW. This is also true of TIFF and other formats. "Containing all of the information" is not impressive or unique when it comes to images. There's some words, and some pixels... not a big deal.
I strongly believe I have time to convert them if needed.
I'm not talking about losing all your photos forever. I'm talking about HASSLE. Yeah you could probably find a way, but the hassle for RAW conversion later is pretty much guaranteed to rise significantly higher and higher than jpeg, tiff, dng, etc. the longer you store them.
Canon, for instance, clearly doesn't give a crap about any of your files being viewable or usable on anything other than their own Digital Photo Pro software that comes with your camera. They routinely release cameras without having helped out or collaborated with Adobe or others in making their RAW files even readable at all (lightroom, photoshop, OR dng converters), and
the very notion of having a non-standardized RAW format in the first place only really makes sense at all if you want to RESTRICT the usability of your formats to encourage people to use your own software.
Canon, in other words, has a vested interest in you being
unable to easily open up RAW files with easily available software. There's not really any other obvious explanation for why they wouldn't just use DNG or PNG or TIFF or something as their in-camera raw format in the first place.
This is why I continue to post in this thread, despite it being fairly head-wall-banging. Because it's just so utterly rididiculous to actively advocate the usage of a format for storage
that was basically specially engineered to NOT be compatible with stuff.
If I were given the task of sitting down and coming up with the
worst possible format for long term storage of file information, I would pretty much draw up something similar to camera RAW formats.