Using M-Disc?

[dilettante]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC

You need a supporting drive to write them, but supposedly they can approach 1000 years of storage for your backups. Precious photos? Home videos?

Anybody using these? Thoughts?

[OptionBase1]

LOL. Look at all of the storage technologies that have come and gone in the last 100 years. Good luck finding a working 8 inch floppy drive now.

And 1000 years? A completely laughable and ridiculous claim. There's no way to do any sort of scale testing that simulates 1000 years of aging.

They should offer a 500 year standard warranty, or you can spring for the 1000 year extended warranty. But then, where/how to store that warranty information? Conundrum!?!?!?

Thanks for the laugh.

[dilettante]

I think the idea was to shoot for something much closer to 50 years. If testing even suggests anything like a 1000 year lifetime then more reasonable life might be safer to expect.

I did find this though:

Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays — Canadian Conservation Institute (CCI) Notes 19/1
https://www.canada.ca/en/conservatio...-cds-dvds.html

[techgnome]

They should offer a 500 year standard warranty, or you can spring for the 1000 year extended warranty. But then, where/how to store that warranty information? Conundrum!?!?!?

Hello sir, we have been attempting to contact you about an extended warranty on your storage disk. According to our records, your manufacturer warranty is about to expire and we would like to offer you an extended warranty. For just pennies a day you can have the peace of mind that should there be a failure in the next 500 years that your photos and other documents will be safe and secure. Hello? Hello? Are you there? Sir?


-tg

[Delaney]

Working in the defense area for several years, we had to guarantee to keep information for at least 30 years. The result of the analysis made was that there are no device able to do that with enough reliability and guarantee of lifetime (if you need to buy the device 30years after), the solution was to multiply the technologies of saving and transfer every 5 to 10 years on new devices. So we had hard-drive, DVD and magnetic band.

[Shaggy Hiker]

I like the idea, in theory. While no individual needs any long term storage, there are advantages to having some form of long term storage. A while back, I heard that vinyl records were starting to show up again for long term storage because they tend to be quite stable and theoretically solve the issue that OB1 brought up: Storing doesn't mean a thing if you can't read the media.

Of course, the vibration in a needle from grooves in vinyl media may not stick around, but a variety of different technologies could theoretically read those grooves.

For truly long term storage (hundreds of years), the media would also have to have some kind of printed instructions as to the encoding used, and that printed media would have to be written in a couple different languages such that it could act as a Rosetta stone. No guarantee about any of that, though. Constantly re-backing up the data is the only really reliable way to keep up with technological change.

[dilettante]

As far as I can tell we can still watch DVDs and VCDs made in the late 1990s as long as the discs have not decayed too far. That's roughly 25 years, and I don't think every DVD and BD player will be off the market and crumbed to dust. There are even PC drives for the discs yet over ATAPI, SATA, USB, etc.

Projecting out 30 years from now though... physical media use has severely declined in the mass market, and that market does drive price (and availability at all for that matter).

But if you think this sounds silly, I've seen people recently advocating magnetic tape as their archival medium. They are using old drives and stock though, so that seems even more niche if not eccentric.


So this "M-Disc" medium has its issues. The main one I see is the special drive required, and probably related editions of disc burning software. But the resulting DVD and BD media are supposed to be readable with conventional drives and software. The only real difference is in the materials used in the disc that require "harder burning" but resist decay better.

[dilettante]

This is a little off topic but not by far. His diatribe does got into "bit rot" of media a little and he mostly discounts it.



I'm no video collector, but his story that physical media is still a thing feels somewhat reassuring. Maybe I'm just old.

At the same time there are favorite films and series of mine that are all but impossible to find from any streaming source.

[dilettante]

The "special drive" is only required to burn them. It has a mode where the laser burns hotter or something. But the M-Discs can be read using any conventional drive.

As for personal uses consider things like family records: genealogy, old home addresses, schools attended, stories and journals, photos, videos, etc. Even if the support for old drives and file formats becomes rare, not having the data at all gives you no chance at all.

I have CD and DVD drives that are 16 to 20 years old and still work fine. In another 15 years those drives might be rare, but surely there will be some people still keeping them and using them. Format-transfer services are around now for old VHS tapes and consumer movie film. I don't think it that unlikely for such things to continue in the future.

[OptionBase1]

The "special drive" is only required to burn them. It has a mode where the laser burns hotter or something. But the M-Discs can be read using any conventional drive.

As for personal uses consider things like family records: genealogy, old home addresses, schools attended, stories and journals, photos, videos, etc. Even if the support for old drives and file formats becomes rare, not having the data at all gives you no chance at all.

I have CD and DVD drives that are 16 to 20 years old and still work fine. In another 15 years those drives might be rare, but surely there will be some people still keeping them and using them. Format-transfer services are around now for old VHS tapes and consumer movie film. I don't think it that unlikely for such things to continue in the future.

The "preferred storage medium de jour" has a very short span of ubiquity. Sure, after that the "readers" aren't necessarily extinct. Heck, there's probably still some original wax cylinder players out there that still work. But that doesn't mean they are either easily or affordably accessible to the common man who has some potentially incredibly meaningful information essentially trapped inside the media, a la the three baddies from Superman II inside the Phantom Zone.

Doing continuous migrations of the data to the forthcoming media types seems like the wisest solution to me. Well, maybe second most wisest, right behind just having it all on printed paper.

[dilettante]

15 years seems pretty viable. Even 30 years shouldn't be out of the question.

But as I said above, if you don't keep the data at all it's Game Over for those wedding videos and valedictorian speeches.

[fafalone]

There seems to be some significant questions about whether new-stock M-DISC are the same quality as the old ones... apparently the disc identifier has changed to be identical to regular a BD disc made by the same company which purchased the rights to M-DISC along with the rest of Verbatim (originally owned by Mitsubishi and manufactured in Japan, now owned by CMC and manufactured in, IIRC, Germany).

The company claims they're the same, but there's color differences too. I don't know enough to say who's right, but it's a consideration for anyone looking at paying a premium for M-DISC over regular BD-R. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder...l_m_discs_now/

Also you only needed a special write for M-DISC DVDs. Regular blu-ray burners will burn M-DISC BDs. (The other caveat here is all the 'special materials tested for longevity' only apply to the DVDs when you read the fine print, and no equivalent testing has been done on the BDs).

[dilettante]

I wouldn't use a ton of these. Probably stage material for a single-session write to DVD.