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mapontosevenths 9 hours ago [-]
Verbatim, who owns M-Disc, doesn't even manufacture discs anymore. They just slap their brand on other peoples discs.
The discs sold as M-Discs now are actually just MABL BD-R's. They used to have a 'stone' data layer. Now they use a titanium metal data layer. MABL discs were always designed to last for about 100 years, and are orders of magnitude cheaper.
100 years is long enough, and 1000 years was always a wild-ass theoretical abstraction. The point is that you'll be dead before your disc is. If the next generation cares and drives are still available they can copy it to a new source.
These same discs are sold with a "Guarantee" as archival discs that are tested with heat/stress to last that 100 years, but any MABL disc really should,and they're much cheaper if you just get regular MABL discs. I think Pioneer is one of the big brands making the archival discs, or at least branding them. I last had to import mine from Japan. If you check the disc ID though, you'll see that archival discs are literally the same disc you can by cheaper without that label.
Some M-Discs still have a proprietary disc label, but my understanding is that even those just come off the same lines.
> Verbatim clarified that these discs were advancements. The technical changes resulted in a different appearance and the ability for higher burning speeds, the changed media-ID was due to an adaptation with regard to other Verbatim products. Verbatim had already shipped the first modified media in early 2022. The data security of the new discs is not inferior to that of the old discs: Data should also last 1000 years, according to the manufacturer.
I'm not sure what you mean by "Verbatim just slaps their brand on other people's discs". Verbatim used to be owned by Mitsubishi Chemical Media, and was sold to CMC Magnetics in 2020. The only two manufacturers I see on that page for Verbatim discs are Mitsubishi Chemical Media and CMC Magnetics.
mapontosevenths 6 hours ago [-]
That's truly a strange article.
Even verbatim's own website no longer makes the thousand year claim. Saying instead "several hundred years".
However their website also claims that the disc's use "etched" stone-like data layers, which is also demonstrably not true. Their own marketing says titanium in other places (on the spindle insert).
I think that Verbatim (or their shambling post-buyout animated corpse) just lies a lot or is filled with confusion about their own product.
> I'm not sure what you mean by "Verbatim just slaps their brand on other people's discs".
I wasn't aware of the chain of ownership. That said, they literally sell the same disc identifier as both m-disc and non m-disc.
I don't think it's just a reused ID either. If you put them next each other they're identical, and they use the same media label. The old disc's were both visually distinct and had a unique ID.
The only difference zeems to be packaging. I don't doubt that it's the same quality.
They stopped selling the much worse LTH discs and all the disc's are good now.
M-disc buyers get what they pay for (if they expect 100 years rather than 1000), it's just that everyone else also gets that for less money.
ndiddy 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah in general the value proposition of Blu-Ray M-Discs makes less sense vs. DVDs because the standard BD-Rs are also inorganic. One thing the random person on Reddit (and the people parroting his/her claims) don't seem to have realized is that the Blu-Ray M-Discs have always been visually identical to standard BD-Rs. Here's a review from 2015 that mentions this: https://goughlui.com/2015/10/16/review-tested-verbatim-lifet...
> The disc itself does have a printable white top, but also features branding in the centre consisting of areas of clear hub. The underside looks pretty much the same as a normal BD-R, being metallic chocolate brown in colour. It is visually indistinguishable.
...
> This bought me to a realization – unlike DVD’s, almost all regular BD-R discs do not use organic dye recording layers. Only BD-R LTH type discs do, and they have been shown to have poor longevity. With one of the main reasons for causing disc failure no longer an issue, it seems possible that this disc is not materially special compared to a regular BD-R.
The review also mentions that the text on the disc packaging quotes a lifetime of several hundred years, so that hasn't changed either. The actual M-Disc testing certification mentioned in the review quotes a 95% CI expected lifetime of 530 years and a mean expected lifetime of 1,000 years (meaning only half the discs can be expected to last that long).
M-Disc isn't an open standard, so the criteria for what is and isn't an M-Disc aren't publicly known. I think it's entirely possible that standard inorganic BD-Rs pass whatever criteria are necessary to call something an "M-Disc", and that there's never been any real difference between a high quality BD-R and an M-Disc BD-R.
mapontosevenths 2 hours ago [-]
They are all HTL now. There are no remaining manufacturers who produce LTH or use organic dyes in blu ray. That said, I agree.
em500 9 hours ago [-]
Note that almost all tests and marketing claims about M-DISC (most notably the 1000-year claim) where about the DVD versions. The main distinguishing characteristic of DVD M-DISC is that they do not use organic dyes like standard DVD+/-R, which can degrade relatively quickly. This is also why M-DISC DVD is not always compatible with any DVD reader/writer.
Verbatim / Millenniata loves to conflate claims about the original DVD M-DISC and the later BD-R M-DISC. But unlike DVD-R, standard BD-R already don't use organic dyes (with the exception of some low grade "LTH" discs). AFAIK there has never been good evidence that the BD-R M-DISCs have any special sauce compared to any other non-M-DISC BD-R. (Strengthened by the fact that there have never been compatibility issues or special equipment requirements to read/write M-DISC BD-R.)
mixmastamyk 5 hours ago [-]
Would like to hear more about the longevity of recordable blurays.
kolinko 8 hours ago [-]
With 100 years you need every other generation to rewrite/refresh them, or the data is lost.
For things recorded today, nobody will care about refreshing for 75 heads, and if during 2100-2125 there are some budget constraints/wars/whatnot, the data will rot.
With 1000 years, you can just throw stuff into a bunker and all that it will take will be for someone in a period of 2800-3025 to take the time to refresh the library. 200 years should be enough to wait through a mild civ collapse or something.
Sure we’re talking about times beyond our lifetimes, but a lot if things we are sorrounded by were planned by people who knew they wouldn’t live to see the outcomes.
hn_submit 27 minutes ago [-]
> Verbatim, who owns M-Disc, doesn't even manufacture discs anymore. They just slap their brand on other peoples discs.
Isn't that the case with all Western manufacturers these days? They buy stuff from China and slap their label on it. Management has no affinity with engineering and technology, all they know is marketing.
steveBK123 8 hours ago [-]
> 100 years is long enough, and 1000 years was always a wild-ass theoretical abstraction.
The software will be an issue before the hardware anyway inevitably
kevin_thibedeau 2 hours ago [-]
The hardware will definitely be a problem. Optical heads have elastomeric parts that are unlikely to last a century. They have precision plastic components that may become brittle. All of the knowhow and specialist tools to make and service them will be gone. USB and the drivers will still be around barring a complete collapse of civilization.
mmooss 4 hours ago [-]
That misapplies systems thinking: It's necessary to have both the software and the hardware, so it is necessary to have the hardware.
By the above comment's reasoning, you wouldn't invest in hardware because you'll lack the software, and then you wouldn't invest in the software because you'll lack the hardware.
esafak 8 hours ago [-]
Include the source (don't use proprietary stuff), and keep it simple. That should not be an issue in this age.
steveBK123 8 hours ago [-]
I think more & more that hobbyists need to keep air gapped old-OS/hardware machines in the garage to manage this kind of stuff.
Otherwise you quickly run into connectivity / driver / application / OS compatibility hassles trying to get even 10-20 year old stuff from our own lifetime experience to run.
I'm not sure how we expect our great-grandchildren to figure out how to get data off a disc/drive in 100 years.
I can look at a film strip or print from my grandfather or play his records more easily than I can run software from my own childhood.
laweijfmvo 7 hours ago [-]
surely AI will just recode the entire system in minutes?
steveBK123 7 hours ago [-]
Yes, AI will simply vibe code drivers for devices it can't talk to in order to read formats it can't read
More likely it will just hallucinate content that plausibly could be on the disc and display that for the unwitting
noinsight 11 hours ago [-]
The drives to read them (Blu-rays) will be the problem. Pioneer stopped manufacturing them in 2024, only LG drives are available now.
Coincidentally I just bought one, they’ve doubled in price now recently.
Also bought some M-Discs to try. They’re half the price in Japan (Amazon) compared to Germany.
QuantumNomad_ 10 hours ago [-]
In a 1000 years even if they don’t have the drives, as long as they still know roughly how it works maybe they will photograph it with a microscope and read the tracks in the M-Disc from that. Then they will have to decode it also of course.
bluGill 10 hours ago [-]
Maybe. The question is why are we needing to read these disks in a thousand years. I would guess right now that the most likely case is information we care about is archived on modern formats such as hard drives, which are constantly being copied to different drives as the old ones go out and so in a thousand years they'll still have all the data in a much more accessible format than a very obsolete disk.
If, instead, we are talking about some human disaster and, that constant copies is lost at some point, we're kind of stuck. I don't think the technology to read those disks will exist either, even though in theory, yes, that could be done. It would be a massive reverse engineering effort and I don't think they will even know to start doing that with these weird disks that the agents had.
If you want something archived for a thousand years, well, we know that clay tablets baked worked, although we sometimes can't read the letters but at least seeing something with the eyes says there's something and if there's enough of them we have decoded language.
The best archival paper in ideal conditions lasts more than a thousand years, but in more typical storage, we can't store paper that long. Paper has only been stored successfully in Egypt for that long. I'm sure there are other deserts though that would count just as well.
throw0101a 9 hours ago [-]
> The question is why are we needing to read these disks in a thousand years.
The British Domesday Book from 1086 is still referenced by historians for all sorts of purposes:
Not sure what kind of present-day data the historians of the future would be interested in.
> If you want something archived for a thousand years, well, we know that clay tablets baked worked […] The best archival paper in ideal conditions lasts more than a thousand years, but in more typical storage, we can't store paper that long.
Well, paper would best be stored in a fairly dry place, so deserts may be a starting point.
Generally the only institutions / organizations that have managed to survive for centuries / millennia have been monasteries. Temples/churches have often been close to communities for public worship, but most religious traditions seem to have groups of individuals that were a bit more 'removed' from society at large. Organizing around such things could be attempted (a plot point in Stephenson's Anathem.)
Generally burying stuff and leaving clues so that an 'advanced enough' society can unbury it at some point may be another idea.
bluGill 8 hours ago [-]
Lots of old books survive. They survive because someone cared enough about it to make a copy. Before the printing press, that was entirely by hand. one of the main purposes of those monasteries you mentioned is to copy relevant works for the next generation. Well, maybe I should say the next ten generations or however long books last depending on the local climate.
Burrowing stuff sometimes works, however, a lot is lost. Even when we attempt to save things, it often doesn't work. Some years ago a town near me had a big unburying of a vault they had saved for 50 years. In there was a brand new car complete with gas in case gasoline was obsolete in 2000. The gas was stale and unusable. The car was completely rusted the point where it couldn't be restored. The only answer that you can be confident of storing something is if someone every few years personally looks at it and verifies it is still in good shape and if not repairs it. Archaeologists can learn a lot from garbage and trash that was buried with no attempt to save it. However, archaeologists are also very aware of the limitations of what they can get. There is a lot they know they don't know because, well, this would not have been saved or been preserved.
mmooss 4 hours ago [-]
> They survive because someone cared enough about it to make a copy.
Sometimes, and sometimes we have the originals. And to make a copy, you need an original, and sometimes the copies were made >100 years after the original.
> Burrowing stuff sometimes works, however, a lot is lost. Even when we attempt to save things, it often doesn't work.
So let's not even try, much less try to solve this reliability problem.
Wowfunhappy 10 hours ago [-]
I think 1,000 years maybe doesn't matter that much. However, these predictions are imperfect. If they're aiming for 1,000 years, that makes me more confident the disc will be readable in 100 years, which may matter more.
vkaku 10 hours ago [-]
Issue with storage is you need shelf stability without ongoing electrical/mechanical work refreshing data time to time. Masked ROMs and M-Discs are those two things which can really last a very long time; Floppies, Hard Disks, Solid State Storage and present day ROMs all require periodic costs, efforts and refreshes to keep them going (that means they can't be kept in storage and then re-opened in 30 years).
We also need a mechanism that outlasts that archival lifespan so how to read Discs or Masked ROMs and how to interpret them, also needs to be stored as well. Repairing electronics is a valuable skill that needs to be passed on across generations as well.
Keeping humans around seems to be the best bet, given how things are going, I wouldn't count on the present set of beings around to preserve any of this information that well either.
mapontosevenths 9 hours ago [-]
> Issue with storage is you need shelf stability without ongoing electrical/mechanical work refreshing data time to time.
For what? Nothing we do today will be even remotely important in 1,000 years. Any tiny fraction of a fraction that is important will have been copied thousands, millions, or billions of times into various formats.
"I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
- Ozymandias - By Percy Bysshe Shelley
throw0101a 9 hours ago [-]
> For what? Nothing we do today will be even remotely important in 1,000 years.
All sort of things done a thousand years ago still shape how we live today:
You know what every one of those things says in common? every generation between when it was created and now has decided it was important and made effort to preserve it. We have no clue or maybe only slight clues of what was lost because at some point some generation decided it wasn't worth preserving. Sometimes it was a hard decision for that generation when they realized they couldn't preserve everything, other times it was not cared about at all. Either way though, it was lost for all time because the chain of caring enough to preserve it was lost.
Spooky23 7 hours ago [-]
The data isn’t the valuable aspect of those examples. The metadata is!
We have a bunch of family photos that were preserved for a few generations. It sucks, many of them we know who they are, the most are lost to time and the death of memory.
Pictures without the context are just images of dead people. With the story, they are priceless memories.
mapontosevenths 8 hours ago [-]
Every single thing you cite has been, and will be, copied many times over and preserved that way. e.g. - We don't have the original Bible, we have eleventy-billion copies of it.
I don't disagree that a few things that happen today will be of consequence. I disagree that any single source of that data needs to last for a thousand years in isolation.
There are, I'm sure, one or two examples of thousand+ year old primary sources revealing otherwise lost information that was still relevant in some way. I suspect not many, other than as datum for academics to ponder.
Important information has always survived by copying.
> Dating from the 3rd century BCE to the 1st century CE, the Dead Sea Scrolls include the oldest surviving manuscripts of entire books later included in the various Jewish and Christian biblical canons, including deuterocanonical manuscripts from late Second Temple Judaism, as well as extrabiblical books. As such, they cast new light on the emergence of Rabbinic Judaism and of Christianity, and their relationship with Jewish religious traditions.
One could similarly imagine a set of M-Discs from today that would be rediscovered 1000 years from now that could prove similarly useful to the people of the future thanks to data on them that has been preserved unaltered since today until then on that set of M-Discs.
overfeed 4 hours ago [-]
> Nothing we do today will be even remotely important in 1,000 years
The irony of quoting the work of a poet who died over 200 years ago is thick.
kolinko 8 hours ago [-]
If I’m not mistaken only optics are really unique to BD and need dedicated production? Everything else is rather universal components so even a hobbyist should be able to build a BD reader from scratch - having access to servos, cnc, and 2000s-level electronics?
ssl-3 2 hours ago [-]
It's universal for us, right now.
But that doesn't mean that it will stick around.
History shows that when we figure out a better way to do stuff, we tend use the new way going forward and the old stuff tends to get forgotten.
artmanja111 3 hours ago [-]
~20 years ago, I used to back all of my stuff up on whatever brand of DVD-R was cheapest at Best Buy. I think it was usually TDK. I figured I’d get around the problem of dye degradation by re-burning the discs every few years.
That, of course, didn’t actually happen. However, I had the same files backed up on a WD MyBook of the same vintage, which was properly parked and stored in an antistatic bag.
The stuff sat in a storage locker — the DVD-Rs in a binder, and the MyBook in its original packaging — for close to two decades.
I finally pulled it all out recently to see what was still recoverable. I figured the discs probably wouldn’t work, but the MyBook would be fine.
In fact, it was exactly the opposite. Every disc read perfectly, but the MyBook wouldn’t even initalize. Ping-ping-ping-thunk.
It’s amazing how unpredictable storage devices can be.
mixmastamyk 2 hours ago [-]
My TDKs from ’96 are still fine.
For stuck mechanical disks I remember a modest bump to the side with a screwdriver handle was sometimes enough to get it going.
hn_submit 28 minutes ago [-]
I store my data on magnetic hard disks in a shed outside my home as a contingency for when my house burns down. I believe magnetic storage is durable enough for the rest of my lifetime (50 years?) and it has the added advantage of being writeable so I can make a backup once a month.
Magnetic tape storage is designed to last decades or more and is cheap to boot. Audio master tapes from 50, 60 and even 70 years ago are still perfectly playable if proper precautions are taken (i.e. baking them in an oven beforehand).
How many people are storing data on a medium and throwing it into storage for hundreds of years? I don't think even the U.S. government does that.
msephton 11 hours ago [-]
I have a few of these drives. They also rip discs very accurately. Bit-identical to my Plextor, at a fraction of the price. But sadly no ripping software offers these the verification logging that is required for redump approval.
rietta 3 hours ago [-]
I am working an a fictional world set 1800 years in the future. A whole subplot is the digital resurrection of 1990s Microsoft Encarta encylopedia which was the first time in a millennia they had a glimpse into this time beyond fragmentary evidence from printed materials. In the timeline of the novel, the disks had been discovered 300 years prior but no one knew how to read them and the general degradation of the substrates. Then 150 years before a graduate student figured out how to use imaging from multiple different disks and piece together to get an entire rendering of the bit pattern. But it took only at the time of the narration that the breakthrough was made on how to decode and render the data in part because of "digital Rossetta stone discovery" found at a dig in North America encrusted in volcanic obsidian glass. Anyway, the professor protagonist ends up traveling in a post oil world by sail to Argentina as an invited guest in a highly interest lecture scene reminiscent of the Dead Sea scrolls discovery.
There is a lot of work to do, but I am actually intellectually interested in realistically understanding how the far future can deal with interpreting the digital dark ages that we currently live in now which are completely forgotten because the administrators stopped copying data one day.
kaliszad 1 hours ago [-]
Laser etching QR codes onto thin sheets of non-corroding metal or ceramics may be a lot easier to preserve and read back. Also etching the ISO/IEC 18004 standard as text/ images may be doable also. Reimplementing the needed software can be done with today's AI in a matter of a day or two. (I have actually done that over a longer period of time though.)
fenaer 6 hours ago [-]
I've looked into M-Disc several times, as a way to backup and archive my personal and family data over the course of my lifetime (and possibly the next generation).
The relative obscurity of the format, the drama around Verbatim's acquisition and the dwindling options for a Blu-Ray player ultimately keep me from investing in it.
Honestly, I'd love a shelf-stable storage mechanism that isn't tape.
some-guy 5 hours ago [-]
It’s far from perfect but old 500gb to 1tb drive lots from ebay are the cold storage” part of my backup plan.
esskay 5 hours ago [-]
IIRC the expected lifespan of a brand new drive in cold storage that has been written to once is 10-15 years. The platters were technically fine after that, it was the lubricants and the screws rusting that caused them to fail. The latter of course is heavily dependant on where they are stored.
everybodyknows 5 hours ago [-]
Also this single bit of "anecdata": I was once told that in long storage attraction between the electron orbitals of head and platter could gradually drive out the air gap, leaving them bonded too tightly for the drive motor to overcome.
tim-- 11 hours ago [-]
> Verbatim Japan claims that M-DISCs now use a titanium layer to prevent moisture ingression and to provide environmental stability
I wonder why every types of discs seem to be entering a de facto deprecated state over the last ~10 years, especially inorganic types are. Is it simply because everyone's on Netflix? Or could it be environmental/material cost issues?
I believe these discs are made by transferring materials by vaporizing them in a series of big vacuum chambers, maybe those materials are toxic and/or China dominated and nobody wants to deal with them anymore?
Avamander 11 hours ago [-]
There's just no mass-market appeal?
Large storage hyperscalers or whatever just use tape?
I can't wait for tape patents to expire.
ssl-3 5 hours ago [-]
Speaking for myself, but: I think it's just lack of market demand.
I used to give people data on a disc -- first floppies, then CD-R, and eventually DVD-R. It got the job done, was often much faster than sorting out how to do it over the network (especially if they were already standing right there), and it was cheap-enough.
For a long time, when I wanted to carry some data from A to B, I'd just put it on some manner of round disc and take it with me. It worked well.
I'd also use them for local data storage at times when they were cheaper than on-line spinny-rust storage. Lots of us here remember having floppy disk indexes and stacks/binders of optical discs. (Some of us still have them.)
But it's been years since I've done anything at all with a disc and I never found a compelling-enough use for BD-R to begin with.
My car has two optical drives right there in the dashboard and I have no idea if either of them can play a CD or DVD full of MP3s. It also has a USB port for mass storage, bluetooth, an aux input, and HDMI (which I'll use I ever feel like getting around to making a lossless digital-domain streamer with librespot). I'm surprised to find myself stating that I'm not motivated at all to see if it can play an MP3 from a disc, but the lack of this motivation is real.
I feel remiss in saying that I don't recall the last time I saw my stash of new CD-Rs although I do think that I know exactly where the last spindle of DVD-R blanks is located.
I think I've even got a USB optical drive somewhere that I scored for free, and I suppose that it would work, but I've never actually used it. For anything, at all. I've had it for years.
---
It seems obvious to say, but: I just do a lot of that stuff over the network these days. When I want to give someone some data, I just email it to them as an attachment -- even if they're standing right there. If it's a lot of data, I can upload it to Google Drive or ye olde Dropbox or something, and share it from there.
Or, pocket supercomputers: If two of us are using our new-fangled pocket computers and want to combine our high-res photos and videos at the end of an outing, stuff like Quick Share on Android (or Apple's AirDrop) can automatically stand up a fast, private, bespoke, temporary 802.11AX network in an instant and get that done at blazing speed without using any wires or external media at all.
When I still want to carry "a lot" of data from A to B, then: I've got thumb drives ranging from a few gigabytes to a half-terabyte. The latter holds the same as 20 single-layer BD-Rs, or ~100 DVD-Rs and is much friendlier to deal with.
For hoarding data at home, I just use hard drives. They're online. They're automatically snapshotted with ZFS to help prevent my own errors from deleting or corrupting stuff accidentally. The replaceable bits are replaceable. The more-unique bits also use RAIDZ2 and are additionally backed up every night with restic to somewhere else in the universe.
I really should add another copy (maybe using a tidy Raspberry Pi system on a shelf in a friend's workshop or something), and that copy really should use an independent backup method, but it's Good Enough and doesn't involve a single optical disc.
---
It's still easy-enough to buy new optical blanks if I wanted them for something, and I used to use quite a lot of them...but I just don't want to use them at all anymore.
I've moved on.
esikich 7 hours ago [-]
I haven't had a CD or DVD drive on any of my devices for 15 years now. They are obsolete. I have 2 TB on a NAS. How many DVDs is that?
mrandish 6 hours ago [-]
Did a little research on BDXL because the need for multi-decade backup longevity, which I never worried much about, became more relevant now that I recently retired and have time to read some 80s 5.25, 3.5 floppies and 8mm/Hi8. Would be fun to see some of the first assembler I ever wrote.
I learned:
* Standard BDXL: ~$6/disc / M-Disc BDXL: ~$12 (longer lasting)
* Write/verify to 100GB BDXL discs at 4x is ~2 mins/GB.
* TFA says "128 GB BDXL never made it to market due to the 2016 bankruptcy" but a larger reason is that even though 128GB ( 4 vs 3 layer) was in the standard, it wasn't well-characterized. Turns out adding the fourth laser was harder/costlier than expected and read reliability was poorer. 100GB 3 layer is the sweet spot.
sehw 11 hours ago [-]
I bought 3 burners and burn 2x copies of every 100GB disc. Only Verbatim burners seem to not fail with 50+Gb discs. By the way!
publlus_enigma 4 hours ago [-]
There is some conjecture that the Blu-ray version of M-Disc are really just MABL discs, which already had significantly longer stability than precious consumer optical formats.
What's particularly interesting though is that, as hard drive and SSD prices continue to surge, and consumer interest in optical formats dwindles, blu-ray can now be cheaper per GB than HDD.
tambourine_man 10 hours ago [-]
Every few years or so I flirt with the idea of backing up to M-Disks. Then I remember how slow and low density they are.
For recording and forgetting, I recently played with LTO, again.
But I always end up at local HDD + remote AWS Glacier.
9 hours ago [-]
varispeed 2 hours ago [-]
I did do that. Box of disks, one weekend burning back to back, then going to a plot of land I buy from time to time in the middle of nowhere and burying it in a weatherproof metal capsule.
bob1029 10 hours ago [-]
AWS Glacier is mostly just LTO done for you with exponentially less risk.
nxobject 10 hours ago [-]
I’m sad they’re retiring Snowball soon, though.
steveBK123 8 hours ago [-]
The risk is they get bored and retire it / retention terms start to get iffy / they 100x prices.
nikanj 8 hours ago [-]
Or their AI chatbot decides you smell funny and bans you forever with 0 chance of appealing to a human
steveBK123 7 hours ago [-]
Right thats the much more likely issue! Some Google-like reaction in the future where using service X (chat/mail/whatever) from Amazon results in being banned across an entire account which also happens to be the account you wrote all your data to AWS Glacier with for 30 years... oops!
bob1029 6 hours ago [-]
I think the most realistic concern here is amazon scanning your backups. I totally get it. A lot of the reason for retaining total control over the storage medium is that what is being stored isn't strictly legal.
You should locally encrypt 100% of the information you store on someone else's system with strong symmetric encryption. In fact, I think Amazon's legal team would quietly prefer that you do this.
I cant imagine many people are backing up movies/tv shows, certainly not ones readily available should a recovery be needed. I can understand more obscure shows but backing up something like The Odyssey would be a colossal waste of storage and money.
(But yes - regardless of what it is, encrypt it)
fer 1 hours ago [-]
For a while Google Workspace didn't enforce the 5TB per user limit and eventually I had 50TB of suspiciously named backups (for real, you should see my DVD collection). Nothing came out of it except for the enforcement and the pain of moving everything elsewhere again.
steveBK123 5 hours ago [-]
Local encryption is not going to help 100 year recoverability
bob1029 3 hours ago [-]
Preserving 256 bits is not that difficult.
splix 10 hours ago [-]
Even the largest 100GB disk seems too small nowadays
amelius 8 hours ago [-]
Yeah we need cheaper, consumer friendly, tape technology.
fallat 8 hours ago [-]
Major market gap for sure.
amelius 7 hours ago [-]
Maybe the tape drive vendors are afraid to cannibalize their enterprise market.
Or the technology is inherently expensive, but I can't believe that is true.
1970-01-01 10 hours ago [-]
This is the only storage media I trust to outlive me. Everything else, including paper, will degrade.
thenthenthen 9 hours ago [-]
It is said that cellulose film can achieve a 1000-year life expectancy if stored in specialized cold and dry storage environments. Oh and its a fire/explosion hazard
On March 18, 2019, it was revealed that Myspace had lost all of its user content from launch until 2015 in a botched server migration with no backup. Over 50 million songs and 12 years' worth of content were permanently lost.[102] In April 2019, the Internet Archive recovered 490,000 MP3s "using unknown means by an anonymous academic study conducted between 2008 and 2010". The songs, which were uploaded between 2008 and 2010, are collectively known as the "MySpace Dragon Hoard".[103]
whateverboat 4 hours ago [-]
Very good, now where can I buy a 5.25inch recorder thingie that I can stick in my PC? No one manufactures them anymore.
shevy-java 6 hours ago [-]
Making a 1000 years future claim is very bold, if not to say: marketing.
I think CDs and DVDs largely died because of USB devices. I have like a
10cm x 15cm external harddisc. So it is not that expensive and can store
5TB of data. It also won't last forever but that is not so important; if
it lasts +10 years that's already fine. Usually you may then purchase a
cheaper new device, that probably then has more storage too. And you may
have some backup devices too. CDs and DVDs in this context are not very
convenient, a bit like how they replaced the older floppy devices (oddly
enough I liked floppy discs more than CDs and DVDs, in particular the
ones you could twist, they also would fly like crazy through the air; the
smaller harder floppy discs were also nice, I remember them from the Amiga
days, but the flexible ones were epic. Storage devices today are much better
but nowhere near as fun).
m3kw9 8 hours ago [-]
1000 years means it's only good for archival purposes, or are people gonna bank on when they pass it on to their loved ones, they'd keep more and more junk instead of using a new medium?
hndhyc0bdt 9 hours ago [-]
Blu-ray again. It's always blu-ray.
Dabbling_Dion 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
hulitu 4 days ago [-]
> M-DISC – DVD/Blu-ray compatible discs
citation needed. My DVD/Blu-ray writer does not support M-DISC
> may last up to 1000 years
or may not. Who knows ?
ricardobeat 12 hours ago [-]
The discs are entirely compliant with the Blu-Ray spec, there is no “compatibility” mark; anything made in the past 10-15 years should work fine. Your writer may be out of spec?
Apparently original M-Disc DVDs required a more powerful laser than normal, but that is not the case for Blu-Ray.
ButlerianJihad 9 hours ago [-]
There is licensing and a compatibility mark, and I distinctly recall that my Philips BD-XL writer was badged for M-DISC and touted its capabilities.
I ran Linux backups on BD-XL 100GB discs for awhile. I lacked access to space in a salt mine, and the M-DISC media was prohibitively expensive, and unnecessary, since the Linux system, its drives, and its backups have all gone away by now. And nothing of value was lost.
As of the 2020s, there are only 2 licensed manufacturers of M-Discs: Ritek, sold under the Ritek and RiDATA brands, and Verbatim with co-branded discs, marketed as the "Verbatim M-DISC".[14][15]
buckle8017 11 hours ago [-]
Confusingly you need an MDISC writer for some but not all disks.
Any bluray reader will work to read tho.
gosub100 6 hours ago [-]
agreed. this is the same industry that blatantly lies about capacity too.
The discs sold as M-Discs now are actually just MABL BD-R's. They used to have a 'stone' data layer. Now they use a titanium metal data layer. MABL discs were always designed to last for about 100 years, and are orders of magnitude cheaper.
100 years is long enough, and 1000 years was always a wild-ass theoretical abstraction. The point is that you'll be dead before your disc is. If the next generation cares and drives are still available they can copy it to a new source.
These same discs are sold with a "Guarantee" as archival discs that are tested with heat/stress to last that 100 years, but any MABL disc really should,and they're much cheaper if you just get regular MABL discs. I think Pioneer is one of the big brands making the archival discs, or at least branding them. I last had to import mine from Japan. If you check the disc ID though, you'll see that archival discs are literally the same disc you can by cheaper without that label.
Some M-Discs still have a proprietary disc label, but my understanding is that even those just come off the same lines.
Some reading:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/yu4j1u/psa_ver...
https://blu-raydisc.info/licensee-list/discmanuid-licenseeli... (search for verbatim and note the manufacturer column)
> Verbatim clarified that these discs were advancements. The technical changes resulted in a different appearance and the ability for higher burning speeds, the changed media-ID was due to an adaptation with regard to other Verbatim products. Verbatim had already shipped the first modified media in early 2022. The data security of the new discs is not inferior to that of the old discs: Data should also last 1000 years, according to the manufacturer.
I'm not sure what you mean by "Verbatim just slaps their brand on other people's discs". Verbatim used to be owned by Mitsubishi Chemical Media, and was sold to CMC Magnetics in 2020. The only two manufacturers I see on that page for Verbatim discs are Mitsubishi Chemical Media and CMC Magnetics.
Even verbatim's own website no longer makes the thousand year claim. Saying instead "several hundred years".
However their website also claims that the disc's use "etched" stone-like data layers, which is also demonstrably not true. Their own marketing says titanium in other places (on the spindle insert).
I think that Verbatim (or their shambling post-buyout animated corpse) just lies a lot or is filled with confusion about their own product.
https://www.verbatim.com/en/m-disc/products/43847-m-disc-bd-...
> I'm not sure what you mean by "Verbatim just slaps their brand on other people's discs".
I wasn't aware of the chain of ownership. That said, they literally sell the same disc identifier as both m-disc and non m-disc.
I don't think it's just a reused ID either. If you put them next each other they're identical, and they use the same media label. The old disc's were both visually distinct and had a unique ID.
The only difference zeems to be packaging. I don't doubt that it's the same quality.
They stopped selling the much worse LTH discs and all the disc's are good now.
M-disc buyers get what they pay for (if they expect 100 years rather than 1000), it's just that everyone else also gets that for less money.
> The disc itself does have a printable white top, but also features branding in the centre consisting of areas of clear hub. The underside looks pretty much the same as a normal BD-R, being metallic chocolate brown in colour. It is visually indistinguishable.
...
> This bought me to a realization – unlike DVD’s, almost all regular BD-R discs do not use organic dye recording layers. Only BD-R LTH type discs do, and they have been shown to have poor longevity. With one of the main reasons for causing disc failure no longer an issue, it seems possible that this disc is not materially special compared to a regular BD-R.
The review also mentions that the text on the disc packaging quotes a lifetime of several hundred years, so that hasn't changed either. The actual M-Disc testing certification mentioned in the review quotes a 95% CI expected lifetime of 530 years and a mean expected lifetime of 1,000 years (meaning only half the discs can be expected to last that long).
M-Disc isn't an open standard, so the criteria for what is and isn't an M-Disc aren't publicly known. I think it's entirely possible that standard inorganic BD-Rs pass whatever criteria are necessary to call something an "M-Disc", and that there's never been any real difference between a high quality BD-R and an M-Disc BD-R.
Verbatim / Millenniata loves to conflate claims about the original DVD M-DISC and the later BD-R M-DISC. But unlike DVD-R, standard BD-R already don't use organic dyes (with the exception of some low grade "LTH" discs). AFAIK there has never been good evidence that the BD-R M-DISCs have any special sauce compared to any other non-M-DISC BD-R. (Strengthened by the fact that there have never been compatibility issues or special equipment requirements to read/write M-DISC BD-R.)
For things recorded today, nobody will care about refreshing for 75 heads, and if during 2100-2125 there are some budget constraints/wars/whatnot, the data will rot.
With 1000 years, you can just throw stuff into a bunker and all that it will take will be for someone in a period of 2800-3025 to take the time to refresh the library. 200 years should be enough to wait through a mild civ collapse or something.
Sure we’re talking about times beyond our lifetimes, but a lot if things we are sorrounded by were planned by people who knew they wouldn’t live to see the outcomes.
Isn't that the case with all Western manufacturers these days? They buy stuff from China and slap their label on it. Management has no affinity with engineering and technology, all they know is marketing.
The software will be an issue before the hardware anyway inevitably
By the above comment's reasoning, you wouldn't invest in hardware because you'll lack the software, and then you wouldn't invest in the software because you'll lack the hardware.
Otherwise you quickly run into connectivity / driver / application / OS compatibility hassles trying to get even 10-20 year old stuff from our own lifetime experience to run.
I'm not sure how we expect our great-grandchildren to figure out how to get data off a disc/drive in 100 years.
I can look at a film strip or print from my grandfather or play his records more easily than I can run software from my own childhood.
More likely it will just hallucinate content that plausibly could be on the disc and display that for the unwitting
Coincidentally I just bought one, they’ve doubled in price now recently.
Also bought some M-Discs to try. They’re half the price in Japan (Amazon) compared to Germany.
If, instead, we are talking about some human disaster and, that constant copies is lost at some point, we're kind of stuck. I don't think the technology to read those disks will exist either, even though in theory, yes, that could be done. It would be a massive reverse engineering effort and I don't think they will even know to start doing that with these weird disks that the agents had.
If you want something archived for a thousand years, well, we know that clay tablets baked worked, although we sometimes can't read the letters but at least seeing something with the eyes says there's something and if there's enough of them we have decoded language.
The best archival paper in ideal conditions lasts more than a thousand years, but in more typical storage, we can't store paper that long. Paper has only been stored successfully in Egypt for that long. I'm sure there are other deserts though that would count just as well.
The British Domesday Book from 1086 is still referenced by historians for all sorts of purposes:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesday_Book
Not sure what kind of present-day data the historians of the future would be interested in.
> If you want something archived for a thousand years, well, we know that clay tablets baked worked […] The best archival paper in ideal conditions lasts more than a thousand years, but in more typical storage, we can't store paper that long.
Well, paper would best be stored in a fairly dry place, so deserts may be a starting point.
Generally the only institutions / organizations that have managed to survive for centuries / millennia have been monasteries. Temples/churches have often been close to communities for public worship, but most religious traditions seem to have groups of individuals that were a bit more 'removed' from society at large. Organizing around such things could be attempted (a plot point in Stephenson's Anathem.)
Generally burying stuff and leaving clues so that an 'advanced enough' society can unbury it at some point may be another idea.
Burrowing stuff sometimes works, however, a lot is lost. Even when we attempt to save things, it often doesn't work. Some years ago a town near me had a big unburying of a vault they had saved for 50 years. In there was a brand new car complete with gas in case gasoline was obsolete in 2000. The gas was stale and unusable. The car was completely rusted the point where it couldn't be restored. The only answer that you can be confident of storing something is if someone every few years personally looks at it and verifies it is still in good shape and if not repairs it. Archaeologists can learn a lot from garbage and trash that was buried with no attempt to save it. However, archaeologists are also very aware of the limitations of what they can get. There is a lot they know they don't know because, well, this would not have been saved or been preserved.
Sometimes, and sometimes we have the originals. And to make a copy, you need an original, and sometimes the copies were made >100 years after the original.
> Burrowing stuff sometimes works, however, a lot is lost. Even when we attempt to save things, it often doesn't work.
So let's not even try, much less try to solve this reliability problem.
We also need a mechanism that outlasts that archival lifespan so how to read Discs or Masked ROMs and how to interpret them, also needs to be stored as well. Repairing electronics is a valuable skill that needs to be passed on across generations as well.
Keeping humans around seems to be the best bet, given how things are going, I wouldn't count on the present set of beings around to preserve any of this information that well either.
For what? Nothing we do today will be even remotely important in 1,000 years. Any tiny fraction of a fraction that is important will have been copied thousands, millions, or billions of times into various formats.
- Ozymandias - By Percy Bysshe ShelleyAll sort of things done a thousand years ago still shape how we live today:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta
* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2187985.The_Origins_o...
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3624887-the-medieval-ori...
Who knows what the actions of a single, seemingly inconsequential, individual could trigger:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavrilo_Princip
We have a bunch of family photos that were preserved for a few generations. It sucks, many of them we know who they are, the most are lost to time and the death of memory.
Pictures without the context are just images of dead people. With the story, they are priceless memories.
I don't disagree that a few things that happen today will be of consequence. I disagree that any single source of that data needs to last for a thousand years in isolation.
There are, I'm sure, one or two examples of thousand+ year old primary sources revealing otherwise lost information that was still relevant in some way. I suspect not many, other than as datum for academics to ponder.
Important information has always survived by copying.
> Dating from the 3rd century BCE to the 1st century CE, the Dead Sea Scrolls include the oldest surviving manuscripts of entire books later included in the various Jewish and Christian biblical canons, including deuterocanonical manuscripts from late Second Temple Judaism, as well as extrabiblical books. As such, they cast new light on the emergence of Rabbinic Judaism and of Christianity, and their relationship with Jewish religious traditions.
One could similarly imagine a set of M-Discs from today that would be rediscovered 1000 years from now that could prove similarly useful to the people of the future thanks to data on them that has been preserved unaltered since today until then on that set of M-Discs.
The irony of quoting the work of a poet who died over 200 years ago is thick.
But that doesn't mean that it will stick around.
History shows that when we figure out a better way to do stuff, we tend use the new way going forward and the old stuff tends to get forgotten.
That, of course, didn’t actually happen. However, I had the same files backed up on a WD MyBook of the same vintage, which was properly parked and stored in an antistatic bag.
The stuff sat in a storage locker — the DVD-Rs in a binder, and the MyBook in its original packaging — for close to two decades.
I finally pulled it all out recently to see what was still recoverable. I figured the discs probably wouldn’t work, but the MyBook would be fine.
In fact, it was exactly the opposite. Every disc read perfectly, but the MyBook wouldn’t even initalize. Ping-ping-ping-thunk.
It’s amazing how unpredictable storage devices can be.
For stuck mechanical disks I remember a modest bump to the side with a screwdriver handle was sometimes enough to get it going.
Magnetic tape storage is designed to last decades or more and is cheap to boot. Audio master tapes from 50, 60 and even 70 years ago are still perfectly playable if proper precautions are taken (i.e. baking them in an oven beforehand).
How many people are storing data on a medium and throwing it into storage for hundreds of years? I don't think even the U.S. government does that.
There is a lot of work to do, but I am actually intellectually interested in realistically understanding how the far future can deal with interpreting the digital dark ages that we currently live in now which are completely forgotten because the administrators stopped copying data one day.
The relative obscurity of the format, the drama around Verbatim's acquisition and the dwindling options for a Blu-Ray player ultimately keep me from investing in it.
Honestly, I'd love a shelf-stable storage mechanism that isn't tape.
From what I understand, Verbatim no longer manufactures true M-DISC media. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1i0ky6v/what_h...
It's all just MABL now.
I believe these discs are made by transferring materials by vaporizing them in a series of big vacuum chambers, maybe those materials are toxic and/or China dominated and nobody wants to deal with them anymore?
Large storage hyperscalers or whatever just use tape?
I can't wait for tape patents to expire.
I used to give people data on a disc -- first floppies, then CD-R, and eventually DVD-R. It got the job done, was often much faster than sorting out how to do it over the network (especially if they were already standing right there), and it was cheap-enough.
For a long time, when I wanted to carry some data from A to B, I'd just put it on some manner of round disc and take it with me. It worked well.
I'd also use them for local data storage at times when they were cheaper than on-line spinny-rust storage. Lots of us here remember having floppy disk indexes and stacks/binders of optical discs. (Some of us still have them.)
But it's been years since I've done anything at all with a disc and I never found a compelling-enough use for BD-R to begin with.
My car has two optical drives right there in the dashboard and I have no idea if either of them can play a CD or DVD full of MP3s. It also has a USB port for mass storage, bluetooth, an aux input, and HDMI (which I'll use I ever feel like getting around to making a lossless digital-domain streamer with librespot). I'm surprised to find myself stating that I'm not motivated at all to see if it can play an MP3 from a disc, but the lack of this motivation is real.
I feel remiss in saying that I don't recall the last time I saw my stash of new CD-Rs although I do think that I know exactly where the last spindle of DVD-R blanks is located.
I think I've even got a USB optical drive somewhere that I scored for free, and I suppose that it would work, but I've never actually used it. For anything, at all. I've had it for years.
---
It seems obvious to say, but: I just do a lot of that stuff over the network these days. When I want to give someone some data, I just email it to them as an attachment -- even if they're standing right there. If it's a lot of data, I can upload it to Google Drive or ye olde Dropbox or something, and share it from there.
Or, pocket supercomputers: If two of us are using our new-fangled pocket computers and want to combine our high-res photos and videos at the end of an outing, stuff like Quick Share on Android (or Apple's AirDrop) can automatically stand up a fast, private, bespoke, temporary 802.11AX network in an instant and get that done at blazing speed without using any wires or external media at all.
When I still want to carry "a lot" of data from A to B, then: I've got thumb drives ranging from a few gigabytes to a half-terabyte. The latter holds the same as 20 single-layer BD-Rs, or ~100 DVD-Rs and is much friendlier to deal with.
For hoarding data at home, I just use hard drives. They're online. They're automatically snapshotted with ZFS to help prevent my own errors from deleting or corrupting stuff accidentally. The replaceable bits are replaceable. The more-unique bits also use RAIDZ2 and are additionally backed up every night with restic to somewhere else in the universe.
I really should add another copy (maybe using a tidy Raspberry Pi system on a shelf in a friend's workshop or something), and that copy really should use an independent backup method, but it's Good Enough and doesn't involve a single optical disc.
---
It's still easy-enough to buy new optical blanks if I wanted them for something, and I used to use quite a lot of them...but I just don't want to use them at all anymore.
I've moved on.
I learned:
* Standard BDXL: ~$6/disc / M-Disc BDXL: ~$12 (longer lasting)
* Write/verify to 100GB BDXL discs at 4x is ~2 mins/GB.
* TFA says "128 GB BDXL never made it to market due to the 2016 bankruptcy" but a larger reason is that even though 128GB ( 4 vs 3 layer) was in the standard, it wasn't well-characterized. Turns out adding the fourth laser was harder/costlier than expected and read reliability was poorer. 100GB 3 layer is the sweet spot.
What's particularly interesting though is that, as hard drive and SSD prices continue to surge, and consumer interest in optical formats dwindles, blu-ray can now be cheaper per GB than HDD.
For recording and forgetting, I recently played with LTO, again.
But I always end up at local HDD + remote AWS Glacier.
You should locally encrypt 100% of the information you store on someone else's system with strong symmetric encryption. In fact, I think Amazon's legal team would quietly prefer that you do this.
Dumping a bunch of bare files named things like:
into S3 buckets is probably a bad idea.(But yes - regardless of what it is, encrypt it)
Or the technology is inherently expensive, but I can't believe that is true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_National_Archives_vault_f...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire
Also related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace#Music
I think CDs and DVDs largely died because of USB devices. I have like a 10cm x 15cm external harddisc. So it is not that expensive and can store 5TB of data. It also won't last forever but that is not so important; if it lasts +10 years that's already fine. Usually you may then purchase a cheaper new device, that probably then has more storage too. And you may have some backup devices too. CDs and DVDs in this context are not very convenient, a bit like how they replaced the older floppy devices (oddly enough I liked floppy discs more than CDs and DVDs, in particular the ones you could twist, they also would fly like crazy through the air; the smaller harder floppy discs were also nice, I remember them from the Amiga days, but the flexible ones were epic. Storage devices today are much better but nowhere near as fun).
citation needed. My DVD/Blu-ray writer does not support M-DISC
> may last up to 1000 years
or may not. Who knows ?
Apparently original M-Disc DVDs required a more powerful laser than normal, but that is not the case for Blu-Ray.
https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/new-m-disc-to-pro...
I ran Linux backups on BD-XL 100GB discs for awhile. I lacked access to space in a salt mine, and the M-DISC media was prohibitively expensive, and unnecessary, since the Linux system, its drives, and its backups have all gone away by now. And nothing of value was lost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC#History
Any bluray reader will work to read tho.