7 ms·

A review of M Disc archival capability with long term testing results (2016)

107 points by 1970-01-01 9mo ago

svilen_dobrev 9mo ago
[2016] would be interesting how that M-disc looks - and reads - today 10 years later..
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- vel0city 9mo ago
  I have a Verbatim BDR that was branded M-DISC. I burned a bunch of data and put a file full of hashes for the files on it when I started using BDR's as backups to get a feel for when my data might be at risk. I use it as a coaster on my desk. My kids have carried it around with sticky fingers. I fidget with it and flex it a good bit. I've left it on my patio table outside for months at a time. I wash it in the sink with dish soap from time to time to clean it and dry it with whatever hand towel is in the bathroom. I abuse it to see when it starts to lose data. I've been doing this now for a bit over a decade. It hasn't experienced any noticeable corruption yet on ~22GB of data, but I'm not doing any deeper reads on it. Spot checks on my properly stored discs have also not lost any data.
AshamedCaptain 9mo ago
I still use optical discs for my personal backups and have done since 95. My biggest concern is whether I will still be able to buy new drives and blank media in 10, 20 years. Or physical media at all... Please do not say LTO tapes. The drives are huge, noisy, expensive, and they have a very quick deprecation policy (new drives cant use old tapes).
- dlcarrier 9mo ago
  The larger issue with tapes is that the small magnetic domains don't hold data as long as the mechanical changes in optical disks.
  - adrian_b 9mo ago
    The tapes are guaranteed for 30 years. Most optical discs do not have any guarantees about lifetime and the worst of them may survive only a few years. There have existed special quality optical discs with gold mirrors that were guaranteed for 100 years, but those are no longer produced and a single modern tape cartridge stores as much data as thousands of those discs. There are several mechanisms of degradation of optical discs. If the plastic does not seal well enough the metallic mirror, the metal can become oxidized and transparent, so it no longer reflects enough of the laser light. This is why certain archival discs used gold mirrors, which cannot oxidize. The plastic resin may also degrade in various ways and cause disc deformation.
    - AshamedCaptain 9mo ago
      Any guarantee made by manufacturer about data on tape longevity is irrelevant unless it is easy for user to create the storage conditions under which is warranted, and that is usually not cheap. not hard to find stories about data on LTO tapes being unreadable after 5 years. The same as stories of data on even the worst CD-Rs being still readable after 30 years ( i can personaly attest to that).
      - adrian_b 9mo ago
        Some CD-Rs will certainly be readable after 30 years, but there have been plenty of bad CD-Rs that have become unreadable after less than 10 years. I had several hundred CD-Rs. Most of them were OK, especially the gold archival CD-Rs from Kodak, so I have migrated the data from them mostly to save space and improve access speed, not for them being too old. Nevertheless there have been a few that have gone bad, but I had duplicates for all of them, so I did not lose the data. Had I not been cautious, I would have lost some of the data. The main problem of optical discs is their much too low capacity in comparison with magnetic media. A small suitcase with tape cartridges contains as much data as a big cabinet full of the most dense optical discs.
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
- kevin_thibedeau 9mo ago
  > The drives are huge You can get 5.25" bay drives.
  - buildbot 9mo ago
    I believe they are all 5.25in, some are just in a case. Even the library drives are just two 5.25 bays put together, a full height drive; vs. the much more common half height.
- buckle8017 9mo ago
  > The drives are huge, noisy, expensive, and they have a very quick deprecation policy (new drives cant use old tapes). Sure but old drives are widely available at low prices.
  - buildbot 9mo ago
    This is true - I got a fiber channel LTO-8 FH drive off ebay brand new in the IBM packaging for less than 750$ Tapes are 60; so breaking even against 15$ per TB HDDs is pretty fast.
  - AshamedCaptain 9mo ago
    No, they are not. Specially when you have to find the one drive that will read your tapes , connect to your computer, and many other constraints that a user will have.
    - adrian_b 9mo ago
      The connection to a computer does not have any special challenges, except that the computer must be a desktop with a free PCIe slot. Unless you have a server motherboard with an on-board SAS controller, you need to buy a SAS HBA card, put it in your desktop and also buy a compatible SAS cable, in order to connect an LTO tape drive to the computer. New tape drives are extremely expensive, e.g. $4500 for the last generation of LTO-9 tapes (18 TB/cartridge), but if you store at least a few hundred TB of data you recover the cost of the drive from the cost difference between HDDs and tape cartridges. I have an older LTO-7 (6 TB/cartridge) tabletop drive, which has cost me $3000 about 7 or 8 years ago (new), and there are several years since I have recovered its cost. If you do not intend to store more than 100 TB, the cheapest solution is to buy external HDDs, but for long term storage you must plan to migrate the data periodically, as the lifetime of HDDs is hard to predict and unlikely to be much greater than 5 years.
    - buckle8017 9mo ago
      I was genuinely confused by your comment so I went looking on ebay. Why are they so expensive now? they used to be dirt cheap
- buildbot 9mo ago
  You can still buy brand new LTO-4 and up from a brief search - I think due to the enterprise use cases it’ll hang around longer than any other format. Tape existed before the HDD; it’ll be there watching HDDS pass away into the ether too. Probably a few tape drives on the Starship Enterprise somewhere. More seriously; you can buy used lto-7/8 for very little these days, and the tapes are extremely cheap per gb. The drives are somewhat loud; it’s not a beside device for sure. I’m finding it a bit of a pain to manage a good backup strategy with them.
  - GTP 9mo ago
    AFAIK the tapes are cheap, but tape libs aren't. Considering that they also take up a significant amount of space, I personally don't see them as a viable backup medium for most private users.
    - protimewaster 9mo ago
      You don't necessarily need a lib, though. Especially if you're interested in a use case where you can store data in a go bag, safe deposit box, etc., it seems like having individual tapes would be preferable. Individual used drives aren't too expensive (or at least didn't used to be). Libraries, in contrast, do tend to be more expensive (and also a lot more trouble to ship).
  - AshamedCaptain 9mo ago
    You put exactly why I said do not mention LTO - You suggest buying multidecade old drives that are no longer manufactured, have weird interfaces that your 2026 PC no longer has, are expensive, large, noisy - You then mention LTO7 which will not read your LTO4 tapes and is not just expensive but literally out of reach economically for single home Basically LTO is a terrible backup strategy unless you have a lot of money regularly that you will spend in order to upgrade your entire equipment every two/three generations (otherwise your newer equipment wont read your old tapes). Or you have so much data to backup that cost of drives is not really an issue.
    - 9mo ago
- adrian_b 9mo ago
  New drives must read and write the previous generation of tapes and they must read the tape generation that was before the previous.
  - AshamedCaptain 9mo ago
    Which is disgrace when you consider that no optical drive is yet available that will not read original red book cd roms from the 80s. You say "it can read from one generation ago" as if it was some great thing about LTO when it is just a laughably fast obsolescence policy and what really kills it for a home user. A blueray drive manufactured today can still fscking write to a 90s CD-R from way before LTO even existed.
    - adrian_b 9mo ago
      That is easy for optical drives, because there is no direct relationship between the size of bits on the optical track and the dimensions of the read/write laser head. For magnetic media, the gaps in the magnetic circuit of the read/write heads are optimized for a certain dimension of the bits from the tape material and the efficiency of the read/write process greatly diminishes for other bit sizes. So there is no obsolescence policy, but there is a real technical difficulty in ensuring compatibility with older magnetic media with different bit densities.
      - AshamedCaptain 9mo ago
        That is not that simple. There is a relationship between laser and media, most optical drives to this day have entirely separate lasers for different generations of media. At the very least, red vs blue lasers. It is not as simple as claiming that optical drives have it easier technologically. If anything, I would claim that tapes have it simpler, definitely for reading at least. There is _nothing_ preventing LTO from retrocompatibility other than market forces.
  - Dylan16807 9mo ago
    That's not true anymore.
- aidenn0 9mo ago
  > Please do not say LTO tapes. Literally every single reply to this comment mentions LTO; never change HN.
  - Spooky23 9mo ago
    HN is full of people who backup but never restore. Lol
  - AshamedCaptain 9mo ago
    I specifically said do not mention LTO because I knew it would happen. LTO-advocates fail to see how pointless LTO is for someone who is well-served by a backup/archival strategy that uses optical media. When I say "I'm concerned about whether I could buy newly manufactured drives and media in 10,20 years", the answer cannot possibly be "LTO". Because in order for LTO to make any economical sense, I would have to buy ancient LTO drives, and ancient LTO media compatible with those drives, and ancient computers compatible with the interfaces used by those drives. Therefore I already know the answer on whether I could possibly buy newly manufactured LTO drives and media in 10,20 years, and it starts with a NO. Even today I would be forced to buy second-hand drives. Why would I even entertain LTO as an option, then? Compare this to BD where in at least today you can buy a simple and cheap USB drive and new media, all of them manufactured today, and not break the bank while doing so. And drives have evolved from $propietary->PATA->SATA->USB, keeping up with the times and interfaces. (Interestingly, I can also buy newly manufactured USB 3.5inch floppy drives. But not media.) I mean, certainly LTO has its advantages, but in the same way that someone requiring to archive 8TB of data would likely screech if asked to do so with BD media, it just doesn't make sense to suggest LTO as a long-term alternative here.
    - buildbot 9mo ago
      Really the one thing that's guaranteed to be manufactured in N years is _some kind of storage_. I wouldn't buy LTO-1 now, but later gens are going to be around for some time, just like CD-ROMs and other optical media, in some form. And readers will always exist barring an asteroid impact or whatever. >Therefore I already know the answer on whether I could possibly buy newly manufactured LTO drives and media in 10,20 years, and it starts with a NO. Even today I would be forced to buy second-hand drives. Why would I even entertain LTO as an option, then? You can still buy brand new LTO-1 media from 2000 - 26 years old. You shouldn't, but you can. https://www.malelo.com/Maxell_LTO_1_Ultrium_Tape_100_200GB_183800_p/183800.html https://www.malelo.com/Maxell_LTO_1_Ultrium_Tape_100_200GB_1... Then here's a cheap drive https://www.ebay.com/itm/355784908408 https://www.ebay.com/itm/355784908408 So if you needed to restore a backup from 26 years ago, it would not cost you very much.
- surfaceofthesun 9mo ago
  I’m in a similar boat. The USB to SATA adapter has kept my 5.25” drive going for quite a few years. Some of my discs are hitting a decade and I am about to create a new set of backups. The market is smaller but the portable blu ray drives are becoming the default now. So far I’ve just kept extra discs on hand plus a backup portable drive. Hopefully blu ray discs will manage to stick around as long as writable dvds.
KillenBoek 9mo ago
Still using m-disc for family photo albums and having them in the bug out bag in case something goes wrong. Inexpensive and light. Such a shame the disk format is dying.
- thomassmith65 9mo ago
  I agree, but it's worse than a shame: it's an indictment of the tech industry! We have the entire planet storing all sorts of important business and personal data digitally - and no longer a good, common way to ensure it lasts even a decade.
  - UltraSane 9mo ago
    LTO tape exists and should last 30 to 50 years in good storage conditions.
    - VikingCoder 9mo ago
      I have a normal PC... I'd love some kind of external tape drive that I can connect with USB-C, or USB-3... But everything is SAS? And no way to convert SAS to SATA? Recommendations?
      - 8fingerlouie 9mo ago
        No recommendations, just brings back memories of the “good old days” with QIC-80 tapes and ZIP drives, both of which came with “desktop” in mind. I still have a ZIP drive around with a parallel port connector. I haven’t owned a computer with a parallel port in 20+ years. I probably also have a QIC-80 tape drive around somewhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarter-inch_cartridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarter-inch_cartridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive
        bombcar 9mo ago
        SLR100 for life!
zetanor 9mo ago
IIRC, "M-Disc" branded discs stopped being "M-Disc"-spec at some point, but since it's quite a niche product that peaked (over?) a decade ago, it's hard to find any definitive information about this in 2026. It's a shame because I liked the format. I'd be glad to see any form of confirmation or correction.
- ndiddy 9mo ago
  If you’re talking about this post, it’s just someone who was misinformed. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/s/cmxnECtgAv https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/s/cmxnECtgAv > 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.
- gambiting 9mo ago
  From what I understand the BDXL discs are made in the exact same way as M-Discs and should have the same longevity.
Luc 9mo ago
Cool, but the method of verifying the data (playing back the movie) seems non-optimal. The movie could have had some data corruption that went unnoticed.
- instagib 9mo ago
  I have a script that creates a hash based on all files in a directory - photos 2004. Then save the hash separately to a text file. I have 3 copies so I can check the archive version, active storage volume, and local version to see if any lost integrity in the transfer process. I’m curious how it would compare against my old CDs and DVDs that were previous backups. My work does something similar for tape drive data.
  - dehrmann 9mo ago
    DVDs use Reed–Solomon coding, so they effectively store a hash and recovery data for you. When a sector is irrecoverable, reading that sector fails.
    - Gabrys1 9mo ago
      For this purpose, I think it would be nice to access the raw data, to see any errors that would be otherwise masked. As someone in the comments suggested, one might compare number of corrected errors in 1, 2, 5 years and compare to the number of redundant bits stored to estimate the expected longevity of the medium
      - dehrmann 9mo ago
        dvdisaster might already be able to do this analysis.
  - pwg 9mo ago
    If you are willing to sacrifice some storage space on the disk, then dvdisaster (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvdisaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvdisaster) can add extra ECC data to the disk that will allow recovery even if some percentage of the disk errors out upon read later. Granted, if one no longer has the mechanical drive, or if the disk errors out beyond the threshold where the extra ECC can correct the errors, the data's still lost. But it (dvdisaster) does provide some protection from the "bit-rot" case where the disk slowly degrades.
kasabali 9mo ago
Does anyone know the control disc used (http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/imgsep16/m-disc-test3.jpg http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/imgsep16/m-disc-test3.jp...) was HTL or LTH?
- dlcarrier 9mo ago
  As tested, it doesn't matter because the disc didn't even have a UV safe resin. The lifespan of the data area is only meaningful if the rest of the disc is intact. Granted, archival discs aren't designed for full-sun exposure to start with, so in theory, the failed disc could have outlasted the other under real-world archival conditions, and this test wouldn't reveal that.
torstenvl 9mo ago
Tangential, but what's up lately with anti-responsive design like this? Modern mobile browsers can render traditional sites just fine. It was the killer feature of the original iPhone. So I really fail to understand why you'd make a mobile version of your site that completely breaks on mobile.
- AshamedCaptain 9mo ago
  The "killer" feature is actually that it was rendering traditional websites NOT fine, but in a bunch of hacks that would force a specific viewport width where most websites would render with reasonable font sizes and double tap to zoom to paragraph would fix the remainder. Specifically this "killer" feature would already break traditional HTML pages with just text (that were 100% responsive even before "responsive" was a thing). The entire mobile HTML stacks is hack on top of hacks. Like everything else in computing, TBH...
cainxinth 9mo ago
I’ve always been skeptical of niche archival formats, even ones as robust as this. Even if the technology itself is sound, companies go out of business and formats go obsolete. I’ve been using plain old mirrored spinning hard drives for years. And for parts of my archive, I give copies to friends and family for added redundancy.
- TacticalCoder 9mo ago
  FWIW I mainly go with offline HDDs and SSDs. And I basically now keep one source of truth, which I synch everywhere, for backups (and I verify the backups and make sure that my main source of truth ain't corrupted). > I’ve always been skeptical of niche archival formats ... and formats go obsolete ... The format is supported by Linux, that's never gonna be an issue. Not only can modern version of Linux read DVD or BluRay formats, should the support disappear, there's not a world in which in 30 years I cannot run an older version of Linux. There are, for comparison, people running Commodore 64 and Amiga hardware, today. You'll always be able to run the software, either on bare metal or emulated. The issue is: will you find a drive in 30 years? As they are still built today and as many DVD readers from 25 years ago are still working today, I take it it's going to not be that hard to find a BluRay drive in 30 years and hook up to a machine running Linux. And even on a BluRay, you simply do not store that much. If one doesn't want to only rely on HDD/SDD and online storage, it's still probably a safer bet to go with tapes: you can store much more data, newer readers can read (up to limit) older tapes and these are battle-tested, supported for a long time, available, reliable. Because, well, it's not consumer tech but enterprisey.
amelius 9mo ago
Why is nobody talking about LTO tapes, and why are the drives still so expensive?

107 points by 1970-01-01 9mo ago

svilen_dobrev 9mo ago

[2016] would be interesting how that M-disc looks - and reads - today 10 years later..

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
vel0city 9mo ago
I have a Verbatim BDR that was branded M-DISC. I burned a bunch of data and put a file full of hashes for the files on it when I started using BDR's as backups to get a feel for when my data might be at risk. I use it as a coaster on my desk. My kids have carried it around with sticky fingers. I fidget with it and flex it a good bit. I've left it on my patio table outside for months at a time. I wash it in the sink with dish soap from time to time to clean it and dry it with whatever hand towel is in the bathroom. I abuse it to see when it starts to lose data. I've been doing this now for a bit over a decade. It hasn't experienced any noticeable corruption yet on ~22GB of data, but I'm not doing any deeper reads on it. Spot checks on my properly stored discs have also not lost any data.

AshamedCaptain 9mo ago

I still use optical discs for my personal backups and have done since 95. My biggest concern is whether I will still be able to buy new drives and blank media in 10, 20 years. Or physical media at all... Please do not say LTO tapes. The drives are huge, noisy, expensive, and they have a very quick deprecation policy (new drives cant use old tapes).

dlcarrier 9mo ago
The larger issue with tapes is that the small magnetic domains don't hold data as long as the mechanical changes in optical disks.
- adrian_b 9mo ago
  The tapes are guaranteed for 30 years. Most optical discs do not have any guarantees about lifetime and the worst of them may survive only a few years. There have existed special quality optical discs with gold mirrors that were guaranteed for 100 years, but those are no longer produced and a single modern tape cartridge stores as much data as thousands of those discs. There are several mechanisms of degradation of optical discs. If the plastic does not seal well enough the metallic mirror, the metal can become oxidized and transparent, so it no longer reflects enough of the laser light. This is why certain archival discs used gold mirrors, which cannot oxidize. The plastic resin may also degrade in various ways and cause disc deformation.
  - AshamedCaptain 9mo ago
    Any guarantee made by manufacturer about data on tape longevity is irrelevant unless it is easy for user to create the storage conditions under which is warranted, and that is usually not cheap. not hard to find stories about data on LTO tapes being unreadable after 5 years. The same as stories of data on even the worst CD-Rs being still readable after 30 years ( i can personaly attest to that).
    - adrian_b 9mo ago
      Some CD-Rs will certainly be readable after 30 years, but there have been plenty of bad CD-Rs that have become unreadable after less than 10 years. I had several hundred CD-Rs. Most of them were OK, especially the gold archival CD-Rs from Kodak, so I have migrated the data from them mostly to save space and improve access speed, not for them being too old. Nevertheless there have been a few that have gone bad, but I had duplicates for all of them, so I did not lose the data. Had I not been cautious, I would have lost some of the data. The main problem of optical discs is their much too low capacity in comparison with magnetic media. A small suitcase with tape cartridges contains as much data as a big cabinet full of the most dense optical discs.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
kevin_thibedeau 9mo ago
> The drives are huge You can get 5.25" bay drives.
- buildbot 9mo ago
  I believe they are all 5.25in, some are just in a case. Even the library drives are just two 5.25 bays put together, a full height drive; vs. the much more common half height.
buckle8017 9mo ago
> The drives are huge, noisy, expensive, and they have a very quick deprecation policy (new drives cant use old tapes). Sure but old drives are widely available at low prices.
- buildbot 9mo ago
  This is true - I got a fiber channel LTO-8 FH drive off ebay brand new in the IBM packaging for less than 750$ Tapes are 60; so breaking even against 15$ per TB HDDs is pretty fast.
- AshamedCaptain 9mo ago
  No, they are not. Specially when you have to find the one drive that will read your tapes , connect to your computer, and many other constraints that a user will have.
  - adrian_b 9mo ago
    The connection to a computer does not have any special challenges, except that the computer must be a desktop with a free PCIe slot. Unless you have a server motherboard with an on-board SAS controller, you need to buy a SAS HBA card, put it in your desktop and also buy a compatible SAS cable, in order to connect an LTO tape drive to the computer. New tape drives are extremely expensive, e.g. $4500 for the last generation of LTO-9 tapes (18 TB/cartridge), but if you store at least a few hundred TB of data you recover the cost of the drive from the cost difference between HDDs and tape cartridges. I have an older LTO-7 (6 TB/cartridge) tabletop drive, which has cost me $3000 about 7 or 8 years ago (new), and there are several years since I have recovered its cost. If you do not intend to store more than 100 TB, the cheapest solution is to buy external HDDs, but for long term storage you must plan to migrate the data periodically, as the lifetime of HDDs is hard to predict and unlikely to be much greater than 5 years.
  - buckle8017 9mo ago
    I was genuinely confused by your comment so I went looking on ebay. Why are they so expensive now? they used to be dirt cheap
buildbot 9mo ago
You can still buy brand new LTO-4 and up from a brief search - I think due to the enterprise use cases it’ll hang around longer than any other format. Tape existed before the HDD; it’ll be there watching HDDS pass away into the ether too. Probably a few tape drives on the Starship Enterprise somewhere. More seriously; you can buy used lto-7/8 for very little these days, and the tapes are extremely cheap per gb. The drives are somewhat loud; it’s not a beside device for sure. I’m finding it a bit of a pain to manage a good backup strategy with them.
- GTP 9mo ago
  AFAIK the tapes are cheap, but tape libs aren't. Considering that they also take up a significant amount of space, I personally don't see them as a viable backup medium for most private users.
  - protimewaster 9mo ago
    You don't necessarily need a lib, though. Especially if you're interested in a use case where you can store data in a go bag, safe deposit box, etc., it seems like having individual tapes would be preferable. Individual used drives aren't too expensive (or at least didn't used to be). Libraries, in contrast, do tend to be more expensive (and also a lot more trouble to ship).
- AshamedCaptain 9mo ago
  You put exactly why I said do not mention LTO - You suggest buying multidecade old drives that are no longer manufactured, have weird interfaces that your 2026 PC no longer has, are expensive, large, noisy - You then mention LTO7 which will not read your LTO4 tapes and is not just expensive but literally out of reach economically for single home Basically LTO is a terrible backup strategy unless you have a lot of money regularly that you will spend in order to upgrade your entire equipment every two/three generations (otherwise your newer equipment wont read your old tapes). Or you have so much data to backup that cost of drives is not really an issue.
  - 9mo ago
adrian_b 9mo ago
New drives must read and write the previous generation of tapes and they must read the tape generation that was before the previous.
- AshamedCaptain 9mo ago
  Which is disgrace when you consider that no optical drive is yet available that will not read original red book cd roms from the 80s. You say "it can read from one generation ago" as if it was some great thing about LTO when it is just a laughably fast obsolescence policy and what really kills it for a home user. A blueray drive manufactured today can still fscking write to a 90s CD-R from way before LTO even existed.
  - adrian_b 9mo ago
    That is easy for optical drives, because there is no direct relationship between the size of bits on the optical track and the dimensions of the read/write laser head. For magnetic media, the gaps in the magnetic circuit of the read/write heads are optimized for a certain dimension of the bits from the tape material and the efficiency of the read/write process greatly diminishes for other bit sizes. So there is no obsolescence policy, but there is a real technical difficulty in ensuring compatibility with older magnetic media with different bit densities.
    - AshamedCaptain 9mo ago
      That is not that simple. There is a relationship between laser and media, most optical drives to this day have entirely separate lasers for different generations of media. At the very least, red vs blue lasers. It is not as simple as claiming that optical drives have it easier technologically. If anything, I would claim that tapes have it simpler, definitely for reading at least. There is _nothing_ preventing LTO from retrocompatibility other than market forces.
- Dylan16807 9mo ago
  That's not true anymore.
aidenn0 9mo ago
> Please do not say LTO tapes. Literally every single reply to this comment mentions LTO; never change HN.
- Spooky23 9mo ago
  HN is full of people who backup but never restore. Lol
- AshamedCaptain 9mo ago
  I specifically said do not mention LTO because I knew it would happen. LTO-advocates fail to see how pointless LTO is for someone who is well-served by a backup/archival strategy that uses optical media. When I say "I'm concerned about whether I could buy newly manufactured drives and media in 10,20 years", the answer cannot possibly be "LTO". Because in order for LTO to make any economical sense, I would have to buy ancient LTO drives, and ancient LTO media compatible with those drives, and ancient computers compatible with the interfaces used by those drives. Therefore I already know the answer on whether I could possibly buy newly manufactured LTO drives and media in 10,20 years, and it starts with a NO. Even today I would be forced to buy second-hand drives. Why would I even entertain LTO as an option, then? Compare this to BD where in at least today you can buy a simple and cheap USB drive and new media, all of them manufactured today, and not break the bank while doing so. And drives have evolved from $propietary->PATA->SATA->USB, keeping up with the times and interfaces. (Interestingly, I can also buy newly manufactured USB 3.5inch floppy drives. But not media.) I mean, certainly LTO has its advantages, but in the same way that someone requiring to archive 8TB of data would likely screech if asked to do so with BD media, it just doesn't make sense to suggest LTO as a long-term alternative here.
  - buildbot 9mo ago
    Really the one thing that's guaranteed to be manufactured in N years is _some kind of storage_. I wouldn't buy LTO-1 now, but later gens are going to be around for some time, just like CD-ROMs and other optical media, in some form. And readers will always exist barring an asteroid impact or whatever. >Therefore I already know the answer on whether I could possibly buy newly manufactured LTO drives and media in 10,20 years, and it starts with a NO. Even today I would be forced to buy second-hand drives. Why would I even entertain LTO as an option, then? You can still buy brand new LTO-1 media from 2000 - 26 years old. You shouldn't, but you can. https://www.malelo.com/Maxell_LTO_1_Ultrium_Tape_100_200GB_183800_p/183800.html https://www.malelo.com/Maxell_LTO_1_Ultrium_Tape_100_200GB_1... Then here's a cheap drive https://www.ebay.com/itm/355784908408 https://www.ebay.com/itm/355784908408 So if you needed to restore a backup from 26 years ago, it would not cost you very much.
surfaceofthesun 9mo ago
I’m in a similar boat. The USB to SATA adapter has kept my 5.25” drive going for quite a few years. Some of my discs are hitting a decade and I am about to create a new set of backups. The market is smaller but the portable blu ray drives are becoming the default now. So far I’ve just kept extra discs on hand plus a backup portable drive. Hopefully blu ray discs will manage to stick around as long as writable dvds.

KillenBoek 9mo ago

Still using m-disc for family photo albums and having them in the bug out bag in case something goes wrong. Inexpensive and light. Such a shame the disk format is dying.

thomassmith65 9mo ago
I agree, but it's worse than a shame: it's an indictment of the tech industry! We have the entire planet storing all sorts of important business and personal data digitally - and no longer a good, common way to ensure it lasts even a decade.
- UltraSane 9mo ago
  LTO tape exists and should last 30 to 50 years in good storage conditions.
  - VikingCoder 9mo ago
    I have a normal PC... I'd love some kind of external tape drive that I can connect with USB-C, or USB-3... But everything is SAS? And no way to convert SAS to SATA? Recommendations?
    - 8fingerlouie 9mo ago
      No recommendations, just brings back memories of the “good old days” with QIC-80 tapes and ZIP drives, both of which came with “desktop” in mind. I still have a ZIP drive around with a parallel port connector. I haven’t owned a computer with a parallel port in 20+ years. I probably also have a QIC-80 tape drive around somewhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarter-inch_cartridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarter-inch_cartridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive
      - bombcar 9mo ago
        SLR100 for life!

zetanor 9mo ago

IIRC, "M-Disc" branded discs stopped being "M-Disc"-spec at some point, but since it's quite a niche product that peaked (over?) a decade ago, it's hard to find any definitive information about this in 2026. It's a shame because I liked the format. I'd be glad to see any form of confirmation or correction.

ndiddy 9mo ago
If you’re talking about this post, it’s just someone who was misinformed. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/s/cmxnECtgAv https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/s/cmxnECtgAv > 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.
gambiting 9mo ago
From what I understand the BDXL discs are made in the exact same way as M-Discs and should have the same longevity.

Luc 9mo ago

Cool, but the method of verifying the data (playing back the movie) seems non-optimal. The movie could have had some data corruption that went unnoticed.

instagib 9mo ago
I have a script that creates a hash based on all files in a directory - photos 2004. Then save the hash separately to a text file. I have 3 copies so I can check the archive version, active storage volume, and local version to see if any lost integrity in the transfer process. I’m curious how it would compare against my old CDs and DVDs that were previous backups. My work does something similar for tape drive data.
- dehrmann 9mo ago
  DVDs use Reed–Solomon coding, so they effectively store a hash and recovery data for you. When a sector is irrecoverable, reading that sector fails.
  - Gabrys1 9mo ago
    For this purpose, I think it would be nice to access the raw data, to see any errors that would be otherwise masked. As someone in the comments suggested, one might compare number of corrected errors in 1, 2, 5 years and compare to the number of redundant bits stored to estimate the expected longevity of the medium
    - dehrmann 9mo ago
      dvdisaster might already be able to do this analysis.
- pwg 9mo ago
  If you are willing to sacrifice some storage space on the disk, then dvdisaster (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvdisaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvdisaster) can add extra ECC data to the disk that will allow recovery even if some percentage of the disk errors out upon read later. Granted, if one no longer has the mechanical drive, or if the disk errors out beyond the threshold where the extra ECC can correct the errors, the data's still lost. But it (dvdisaster) does provide some protection from the "bit-rot" case where the disk slowly degrades.

kasabali 9mo ago

Does anyone know the control disc used (http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/imgsep16/m-disc-test3.jpg http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/imgsep16/m-disc-test3.jp...) was HTL or LTH?

dlcarrier 9mo ago
As tested, it doesn't matter because the disc didn't even have a UV safe resin. The lifespan of the data area is only meaningful if the rest of the disc is intact. Granted, archival discs aren't designed for full-sun exposure to start with, so in theory, the failed disc could have outlasted the other under real-world archival conditions, and this test wouldn't reveal that.

torstenvl 9mo ago

Tangential, but what's up lately with anti-responsive design like this? Modern mobile browsers can render traditional sites just fine. It was the killer feature of the original iPhone. So I really fail to understand why you'd make a mobile version of your site that completely breaks on mobile.

AshamedCaptain 9mo ago
The "killer" feature is actually that it was rendering traditional websites NOT fine, but in a bunch of hacks that would force a specific viewport width where most websites would render with reasonable font sizes and double tap to zoom to paragraph would fix the remainder. Specifically this "killer" feature would already break traditional HTML pages with just text (that were 100% responsive even before "responsive" was a thing). The entire mobile HTML stacks is hack on top of hacks. Like everything else in computing, TBH...

cainxinth 9mo ago

I’ve always been skeptical of niche archival formats, even ones as robust as this. Even if the technology itself is sound, companies go out of business and formats go obsolete. I’ve been using plain old mirrored spinning hard drives for years. And for parts of my archive, I give copies to friends and family for added redundancy.

TacticalCoder 9mo ago
FWIW I mainly go with offline HDDs and SSDs. And I basically now keep one source of truth, which I synch everywhere, for backups (and I verify the backups and make sure that my main source of truth ain't corrupted). > I’ve always been skeptical of niche archival formats ... and formats go obsolete ... The format is supported by Linux, that's never gonna be an issue. Not only can modern version of Linux read DVD or BluRay formats, should the support disappear, there's not a world in which in 30 years I cannot run an older version of Linux. There are, for comparison, people running Commodore 64 and Amiga hardware, today. You'll always be able to run the software, either on bare metal or emulated. The issue is: will you find a drive in 30 years? As they are still built today and as many DVD readers from 25 years ago are still working today, I take it it's going to not be that hard to find a BluRay drive in 30 years and hook up to a machine running Linux. And even on a BluRay, you simply do not store that much. If one doesn't want to only rely on HDD/SDD and online storage, it's still probably a safer bet to go with tapes: you can store much more data, newer readers can read (up to limit) older tapes and these are battle-tested, supported for a long time, available, reliable. Because, well, it's not consumer tech but enterprisey.

amelius 9mo ago

Why is nobody talking about LTO tapes, and why are the drives still so expensive?