Sorry to hear about your parents @winstonwolfe that must have been a hard time to go through.
Maybe some time in the future there is going to be something more reliable than the storage we have now.
a few years back I used a cd to put some images to, then a few weeks later I wanted to take the images and put them on my brothers computer, when I came to using the disk it was scratch and unreadable.
I do like flash drives I think they are pretty cool, but I have bought cheap ones from eBay and found that once the data is on there and the drive goes corrupt it was pointless of buying cheap.
what do you use right now for you storage option?
I do online and offline storage. For online, I use Google+, imgur, and Flickr. For offline, I'm partial to Western Digitals "Duo" drives, which is a case with 2 hard drives inside. You can set them up any number of ways, but I prefer to use the "mirrored" mode, which is when one drive mirrors the other. This way if one drive dies, the other should still be intact. Just replace the bad one and move on. This of course doesn't address what would happen if the house burned down or if there was a lightning strike. Ultimately, the art of archiving (digital or not) is a constant uphill battle.