The company pivoted to other storage solutions, like selling rebranded optical disc drives, external hard drives, and network-attached storage devices. However, none of these products were particularly unique or competitive, as Iomega went from dominating a specific niche to fighting in a market segment where it had no particular competitive advantage

An interesting lesson to try to apply to current business (not to mention career skills).

I remember cataloging and transferring a bunch of a laboratory's "Bernoulli" cartridges to Zip because they worried that they wouldn't be able to replace the Bernoulli drive if/when it failed. Then to CD, because it was incomprehensible that optical drives would go the way of the floppy. Probably a decade of data, and I think it fit on like 20 CDROMs.

For a while, I thought it was ok to just keep everything on multiple hard drives, but now it would take a special effort to get data off those IDE HDDs. And SSDs decay if not powered. It's hard to keep electronic data for 100 years.

I bought into the carbon-based BluRay discs. Good for 1000 years, right? ;) I haven't ever checked them since writing data to them.

It's sad that optical media storage is essentially dead now. I burned a zillion cds over the years, and 99% of them were perfect even 10 years later. And at some point i started adding 10% PAR2 files to the discs, which made it so even if up to 10% of the cd was totally unreadable you could still recover 100% of the data. Heck, PAR2 file software becoming abandoned hurts at least as much.

Does anyone know of a modern version of PAR2 files?

Yes: PAR2

A lot of the software has been abandoned, but par2cmdline is still being updated. The last commit was last month.

Didn’t they make a cliq drive too? I vaguely remember having an mp3 player that used those smaller drives.