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After going down this rabbit hole, I concluded that M-Disc is the right trade off at the moment. They’re not too expensive, the writers are available, they’ll l
by quag 7y ago
After going down this rabbit hole, I concluded that M-Disc is the right trade off at the moment. They’re not too expensive, the writers are available, they’ll last, and they could be reverse engineered if discovered in the future.
The second choice is using hard drives (easily available) and every so often power them up and copy data to new drives.
If you have a small quantity of data, then encode and laser print onto paper, with a font designed for optical scanning or QR code’s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
- eitland 7y agoSeems hard to get hold of M-DISCs now. Are they still produced?
- Seenso 7y ago> They’re not too expensive, the writers are available, they’ll last, and they could be reverse engineered if discovered in the future. IIRC, the writers for M-DISCs are special, but the reader can be any DVD or Blu-ray drive. Honestly, I think the biggest consideration for digital archival media isn't so much the longevity of the media, but the future availability of equipment to read it. That's one of the biggest benefits of paper, IMHO. Besides being very well-understood material, nearly everyone is born with the necessary reading equipment and the decoding software is very common.
- reificator 7y ago> the decoding software is very common. [Citation needed]
- pmiller2 7y agoYou want a citation for the claim that many people are literate and/or can visually process images?
- aetherspawn 7y agoIt’s a joke. Because some people can’t read. Har har har :)
- a1369209993 7y ago> [Citation needed] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy There you go.
- allovernow 7y agoI also came across M-Disc but iirc there is no real verification of the longevity claims outside of marketing from the manufacturer. >The second choice is using hard drives (easily available) and every so often power them up and copy data to new drives. I suppose the question is whether doing so could remain under the error correction threshold indefinitely, since there will be errors accumulating both during copying and over time in cold storage. If manufacture of new drives stops, it also isn't clear to me if only the data stored on them has a 30 year life or if the medium itself decays regardless of whether it is in use or not. In theory I imaging keeping an unused NAND or even magnetic drive in cool dry storage should preserve it's physical integrity indefinitely...
- pmiller2 7y agoI came across this, which describes a "torture test" more rigorous than most accelerated life tests: https://www.zdnet.com/article/torture-testing-the-1000-year-dvd/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/torture-testing-the-1000-year-.... TL;DR: The CD-R's didn't survive the process, but the M-discs did, with their data intact.