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Safty razors! Why would anyone spend 20$ on the new fangled 30 million blade razor that mighy last one shave? When you can spend pennies even if you change blades every shave.

Magnetic tape. It’s one of the better long-term offline backup solutions. It is compact, inexpensive, has no moving parts (bearings, motors, reader heads), no scratchable surfaces, and can last for decades in a moderately climate-controlled room.

Just keep it away from magnets… or iron vaults. According to an anecdote (that I can’t find right now), a large bank vault was repurposed as an offsite backup storage, except it kept wiping the magnetic tapes because the thick iron walls reacted to changes in the geomagnetic field.

Phones from 2000-2010. Linux/PostmarketOS allows you to run these as mini webservers with webcam’s built-in (depending on chip support)

Also PostmarketOS are looking for a new name, so if you’ve got a suggestion put it here: https://nextcloud.postmarketos.org/apps/forms/s/cAYZZrCqLnrfMPEMAAonCWwx

Obligatory thought to cobol, which is stil the backbone of banking computers.

I would also think to the good old electromechanical relay which are still pretty common

More political, but whatever what imperator Musk thinks Privacy isn’t obsolete

Writing your passwords in a piece of paper. Safer than storing it digitally and easier for people that don’t know how to use password managers or computers in general to understand what to do to access your stuff if you’re under a difficult situation or dead.

Also, physical photos. Yes yes, we all have gigabytes of photos, but almost never check any of them. Physicals catch my glance at home very often, great decoration. I’ve also took to writing the day, place and people on the back, plus any other important bits of context.

Printing out tickets as a backup. I do this for concerts and travel because then I don’t have to worry about batteries dying, wifi/roaming not being available, getting logged out and having trouble getting back to the ticket, etc.

I also print out maps when doing wilderness backpacks because even if you download the map you’ll burn through your battery life well before the hike is over but a paper map is just as good. If I really need to confirm my location I can occasionally turn on the app and shut it off. I keep the maps in a gallon ziplock so water isn’t an issue.

Analogue clocks, particularly clock towers in towns, but also just basic clocks on the wall in your home. With smart devices everywhere, it seems like they’re not needed and probably old-fashioned. The circular 12-hour clock face probably feels like the floppy disk icon or the rotary telephone, in terms of how ‘of another era’ it is, but it’s still a fantastic and resilient form factor for the purpose of visualising the passage of time. Digital is great, but analogue will be with us for the foreseeable future (and I’m including in that the representation of analogue in a digital form, e.g. on smartwatches that provide a classic clock face graphic).

Tape drives. Remember those big reels of tape on mainframes in the 80s? They don’t look exactly like that anymore, but tape is still used for backups/long term archival because they offer the lowest cost per gigabyte and decent longevity without needing to be powered, as long as you don’t need to access the data all that fast or often.

Those dank memes and cat videos you posted in 2010 are probably on tape in a data centre somewhere

IRC

Developers. Yes, AI can sling a lot of code, but it can’t make business decisions and it can’t please a difficult customer.

Wired headphones

Leeches are still used in some surgeries.

Magnetic tape. Datacenters use it for long term storage.

Fax machines. Phone lines are pretty private, and sending a fax is usually more secure than emailing something, especially if someone else manages your email.