It can't be too far away to where I can get such a device at a reasonable price to hold 200 data CDs. This is probably a year or more of data for me. Given a data store like that for the raw data CDs, one can imagine loading it up and just letting a computer grind for days looking for whatever is of current interest. I don't know how to predict what I might want to do in the future.
Any processing loses something.
We can do no better than save the raw data, I think. The same is true for the capacity of disk drives.