Hi Chris,

Actually, nearly all systems my customers run these days don't have a DVD drive anymore, and in 5 or 6 years we will be *really* hard pressed to find one that still works, and even then you should use stuff like M-DISC to be near certain about longevity. SANDISK's WORM SD card used to the trick, but they are EOL. see: link 

In one customers case we were not even allowed to use a password manager like keepass because it's open source .... 

yeah yeah... quit laughing, but that is how it is, and i must deal with it 😛

So, i started thinking, since they are really small files, why not print them in a format an OCR scanner can easily recognize, and recreate the files.

Paper printed using laserprinters is a surprisingly stable medium, takes almost no space in a vault, and will last much longer then the SQL server data using that encryption (15 years for tax laws). 

I'll keep looking and report back what i have figured out.