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Never heard of M-Disc (defunct) til I read this, and from the Wikipedia page on M-Disc about Syylex for "more durable" optical media. Whats the potentially lon

Never heard of M-Disc (defunct) til I read this, and from the Wikipedia page on M-Disc about Syylex for "more durable" optical media. Whats the potentially longest lasting optical media available to consumers today?

joe_the_user 5y ago
If your media lasts a million years but all the machines that can read it vanish in twenty, where's the win? I assume the evolved rats or bunny rabbits that follow us may reverse engineer it at some point in their evolution and then just shake their fuzzy heads. Edit: Note, in the early nineties, a lot of library got sold proprietary optical drives as archiving solutions and when those became pink elephants, they wrote learned papers about "you can never what medium will last"
- wmf 5y ago
  There have been various ideas about putting decoding instruction in human-readable format at the beginning of the media so that people in the future could use a simple magnifying glass to read the info that would allow them to build a device to read the rest of the data. Nobody cares enough to actually use that stuff though.
  - BuildTheRobots 5y ago
    "5G Optical Storage" is designed with this in mind. The first layer can be read with an optical microscope and polariser which contains instructions for building something to read the second layer.
- VectorLock 5y ago
  You can always make new drives or new ways to read media.
mkj 5y ago
It looks like the original M-Disc went broke but discs are still being made by Verbatim? That one looked more promising than other formats, at least it's readable by normal drives. Future terapixel cameras or scanners could probably decode a disc from an image, right?
- Kye 5y ago
  Shiny discs need a laser in a dark, stable space with lots of cache and a purpose-built lens and sensor to read them reliably. I don't see a camera or a scanner having that reliability. Every new pixel you want to render from a lens reveals more and more flaws. That's why older lenses often perform poorly on newer digital cameras: the designers didn't have to contend with 24, 50, 100... megapixel sensors. Even the 24 baseline already pushes what the film they make 4K remasters from can support and that's twice as big as what most film still cameras use.

joe_the_user 5y ago

If your media lasts a million years but all the machines that can read it vanish in twenty, where's the win? I assume the evolved rats or bunny rabbits that follow us may reverse engineer it at some point in their evolution and then just shake their fuzzy heads. Edit: Note, in the early nineties, a lot of library got sold proprietary optical drives as archiving solutions and when those became pink elephants, they wrote learned papers about "you can never what medium will last"

wmf 5y ago
There have been various ideas about putting decoding instruction in human-readable format at the beginning of the media so that people in the future could use a simple magnifying glass to read the info that would allow them to build a device to read the rest of the data. Nobody cares enough to actually use that stuff though.
- BuildTheRobots 5y ago
  "5G Optical Storage" is designed with this in mind. The first layer can be read with an optical microscope and polariser which contains instructions for building something to read the second layer.
VectorLock 5y ago
You can always make new drives or new ways to read media.

mkj 5y ago

It looks like the original M-Disc went broke but discs are still being made by Verbatim? That one looked more promising than other formats, at least it's readable by normal drives. Future terapixel cameras or scanners could probably decode a disc from an image, right?

Kye 5y ago
Shiny discs need a laser in a dark, stable space with lots of cache and a purpose-built lens and sensor to read them reliably. I don't see a camera or a scanner having that reliability. Every new pixel you want to render from a lens reveals more and more flaws. That's why older lenses often perform poorly on newer digital cameras: the designers didn't have to contend with 24, 50, 100... megapixel sensors. Even the 24 baseline already pushes what the film they make 4K remasters from can support and that's twice as big as what most film still cameras use.