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Bummer. I've always considered magnetic tape to be indestructable, for all practical purposes. But more and more I'm starting to consider M-Discs as my archival

Bummer. I've always considered magnetic tape to be indestructable, for all practical purposes. But more and more I'm starting to consider M-Discs as my archival storage media of choice. Does anyone here use them for archiving their photos/music/video data? I am less afraid of death itself than of being forgotten afterwards. I need something I can trust my legacy with.

hga 11y ago
What really concerns me about M-Discs is the multiple reports on Amazon.com that they don't have a handle on quality control. If one or more discs bought in a single pack fail right off the bat, how are we to believe that the ones that are written successfully really are going to last for a long time? If your really important data, the stuff that you don't want forgotten afterwards, is relatively small (vs. mass market media where there's always more copies out there), I'd go with high quality CD-Rs in environmentally well controlled locations, unless MAM-A Gold DVD recordable media turned out to be a lot more reliable than we expected. Don't know about BD recordable, it's new enough and small enough compared to LTO tape, that it's not currently attractive to me. Of course, you can use several types of media, and you really need geographic dispersion as well. Tape is fine, as long as you keep renewing it, buying new media and copying your stuff to it. Storing it with two or more high tier cloud providers might also be a good gambit.
- sdfghjkl34567 11y ago
  I'm responding to your comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9696575 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9696575 Like I mentioned earlier in that thread, most armed clashes between antifa and fascists are probably in Russia. There are more recent examples in the US as well. I won't google for you but they are there. The Russian situation is particularly violent.
  - hga 11y ago
    Did not know that at all, I'm not paying attention to Russia at that level, and find it remarkable. Certainly the labeling of some Russians as "Nazis", to a WWII focused at various times "old" guy like me. Thanks for drawing my attention to this, although with a gangster regime like Putin's I've pretty much written off Russia at this level. (Note, to make sure I reply to replies to an 8 day old post referring to an 164 day old post, you're welcome to ping me by the email in my HN profile info, you were lucky I saw this.)

hga 11y ago

What really concerns me about M-Discs is the multiple reports on Amazon.com that they don't have a handle on quality control. If one or more discs bought in a single pack fail right off the bat, how are we to believe that the ones that are written successfully really are going to last for a long time? If your really important data, the stuff that you don't want forgotten afterwards, is relatively small (vs. mass market media where there's always more copies out there), I'd go with high quality CD-Rs in environmentally well controlled locations, unless MAM-A Gold DVD recordable media turned out to be a lot more reliable than we expected. Don't know about BD recordable, it's new enough and small enough compared to LTO tape, that it's not currently attractive to me. Of course, you can use several types of media, and you really need geographic dispersion as well. Tape is fine, as long as you keep renewing it, buying new media and copying your stuff to it. Storing it with two or more high tier cloud providers might also be a good gambit.

sdfghjkl34567 11y ago
I'm responding to your comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9696575 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9696575 Like I mentioned earlier in that thread, most armed clashes between antifa and fascists are probably in Russia. There are more recent examples in the US as well. I won't google for you but they are there. The Russian situation is particularly violent.
- hga 11y ago
  Did not know that at all, I'm not paying attention to Russia at that level, and find it remarkable. Certainly the labeling of some Russians as "Nazis", to a WWII focused at various times "old" guy like me. Thanks for drawing my attention to this, although with a gangster regime like Putin's I've pretty much written off Russia at this level. (Note, to make sure I reply to replies to an 8 day old post referring to an 164 day old post, you're welcome to ping me by the email in my HN profile info, you were lucky I saw this.)