8 ms·

M-DISC – DVD/Blu-ray compatible discs that may last up to 1000 years

207 points by gurjeet 1mo ago

hulitu 1mo 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 28d 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 27d 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. https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/new-m-disc-to-provide-up-to-1-000-years-of-permanent-data-storage.150639/ 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC#History 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]
    - ricardobeat 27d ago
      > And nothing of value was lost. Depends. There are still barely any options for archival-quality digital media for regular people. M-Disc is one of them. Most of what we have access to has a <30 year shelf life.
      - publlus_enigma 27d ago
        Closer to < 10 years for hard drives, SD Cards and USB sticks. All of the combine controller electronics with the storage medium itself, which is another point of failure, and one not easily repaired. Their lack of electrical isolation from a host, combined with their lack of true write protection, makes them vulnerable during read. Sadly, 5.25" internal Blu-ray drives are all but extinct now, though USB-C variants are still somewhat readily available with transports from Hitachi-LG.
- buckle8017 27d ago
  Confusingly you need an MDISC writer for some but not all disks. Any bluray reader will work to read tho.
- gosub100 27d ago
  agreed. this is the same industry that blatantly lies about capacity too.
noinsight 28d 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_ 27d 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 27d 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.
    - vkaku 27d 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.
numpad0 28d ago
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 27d 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.
- esikich 27d 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?
- ssl-3 27d 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.
sehw 28d 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!
msephton 27d 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.
tim-- 27d ago
> Verbatim Japan claims that M-DISCs now use a titanium layer to prevent moisture ingression and to provide environmental stability From what I understand, Verbatim no longer manufactures true M-DISC media. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1i0ky6v/what_happened_to_the_new_mdisc_controversy_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1i0ky6v/what_h... It's all just MABL now.
splix 27d ago
Even the largest 100GB disk seems too small nowadays
- amelius 27d ago
  Yeah we need cheaper, consumer friendly, tape technology.
  - fallat 27d ago
    Major market gap for sure.
    - amelius 27d 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.
tambourine_man 27d 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.
- bob1029 27d ago
  AWS Glacier is mostly just LTO done for you with exponentially less risk.
  - nxobject 27d ago
    I’m sad they’re retiring Snowball soon, though.
  - steveBK123 27d ago
    The risk is they get bored and retire it / retention terms start to get iffy / they 100x prices.
    - nikanj 27d ago
      Or their AI chatbot decides you smell funny and bans you forever with 0 chance of appealing to a human
      - steveBK123 27d 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 27d 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. Dumping a bunch of bare files named things like: THE.ODYSSEY.2026.2160p.WEB-DL.DDP5.1.DV.HDR.H.265-GROUP.mkv into S3 buckets is probably a bad idea.
1970-01-01 27d ago
This is the only storage media I trust to outlive me. Everything else, including paper, will degrade.
- thenthenthen 27d 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
  - ButlerianJihad 27d ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965_MGM_vault_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965_MGM_vault_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_National_Archives_vault_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_National_Archives_vault_f... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire Also related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace#Music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace#Music 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]
    - HDBaseT 27d ago
      If M-DISCs were caught in a fire, I don't think they are readable either.
      - thenthenthen 26d ago
        Film is often stores in actual bunkers because its so dangerous
hndhyc0bdt 27d ago
Blu-ray again. It's always blu-ray.
mapontosevenths 27d 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. Some reading: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/yu4j1u/psa_verbatim_no_longer_sells_real_m_discs_now/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/yu4j1u/psa_ver... https://blu-raydisc.info/licensee-list/discmanuid-licenseelist.php# https://blu-raydisc.info/licensee-list/discmanuid-licenseeli... (search for verbatim and note the manufacturer column)
- em500 27d 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.)
  - 27d ago
m3kw9 27d 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?
Dabbling_Dion 27d ago
[dead]
shevy-java 27d 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).
mrandish 27d 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.
fenaer 27d 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 27d 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 27d 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 27d 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.
publlus_enigma 27d 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.
whateverboat 27d 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.
artmanja111 27d 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 27d 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.
- RetroTechie 27d ago
  Many hobbyist users don't check optical discs' contents after being written. Instead just rely on the "success" or "fail" provided by recording software. Or simply re-insert a written disc & take a glance at the directory structure. As opposed to read back an entire disc's contents & compare bit-for-bit with the source data. Read: discs could be bad on day 1. Or mostly ok but with some corrupted files in there. But user didn't check, notice or even care. Decades of storage don't improve anything (other than the data not being needed anyway).
rietta 27d 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 27d 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.)
hn_submit 27d 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.
bethekidyouwant 27d ago
When you die your kids are going to throw most of your stuff in the bin. Those discs especially.
- publlus_enigma 27d ago
  I've burned our home movies etc onto Bluray (BDMV) precisely because I think it's the easiest way to preserve these memories in a self a documenting way. What has a greater chance of being watched in the future? A disc labeled "Home Movies 2020-2022" that conforms to a wells documenting standard (even if it is obsolete in the future), versus a folder on a NAS that can only be accessed over SMB, or an account on a cloud storage service whose terms and authentication method may change without notice? I'd be willing to bet that the longevity and accessibility of the former outweighs the latter. All of these approaches require ongoing maintenance: the latter methods require maintenance against an environment that is actively changing and not self a documenting. I don't think we should underestimate the power of a physical object that can be inspected and transferred by anyone capable of manipulating and observing the world.
bunkydoo 27d ago
[dead]

207 points by gurjeet 1mo 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 28d 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 27d 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. https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/new-m-disc-to-provide-up-to-1-000-years-of-permanent-data-storage.150639/ 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC#History 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]
  - ricardobeat 27d ago
    > And nothing of value was lost. Depends. There are still barely any options for archival-quality digital media for regular people. M-Disc is one of them. Most of what we have access to has a <30 year shelf life.
    - publlus_enigma 27d ago
      Closer to < 10 years for hard drives, SD Cards and USB sticks. All of the combine controller electronics with the storage medium itself, which is another point of failure, and one not easily repaired. Their lack of electrical isolation from a host, combined with their lack of true write protection, makes them vulnerable during read. Sadly, 5.25" internal Blu-ray drives are all but extinct now, though USB-C variants are still somewhat readily available with transports from Hitachi-LG.
buckle8017 27d ago
Confusingly you need an MDISC writer for some but not all disks. Any bluray reader will work to read tho.
gosub100 27d ago
agreed. this is the same industry that blatantly lies about capacity too.

noinsight 28d 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_ 27d 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 27d 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.
  - vkaku 27d 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.

numpad0 28d ago

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 27d 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.
esikich 27d 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?
ssl-3 27d 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.

sehw 28d 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!

msephton 27d 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.

tim-- 27d ago

> Verbatim Japan claims that M-DISCs now use a titanium layer to prevent moisture ingression and to provide environmental stability From what I understand, Verbatim no longer manufactures true M-DISC media. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1i0ky6v/what_happened_to_the_new_mdisc_controversy_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1i0ky6v/what_h... It's all just MABL now.

splix 27d ago

Even the largest 100GB disk seems too small nowadays

amelius 27d ago
Yeah we need cheaper, consumer friendly, tape technology.
- fallat 27d ago
  Major market gap for sure.
  - amelius 27d 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.

tambourine_man 27d 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.

bob1029 27d ago
AWS Glacier is mostly just LTO done for you with exponentially less risk.
- nxobject 27d ago
  I’m sad they’re retiring Snowball soon, though.
- steveBK123 27d ago
  The risk is they get bored and retire it / retention terms start to get iffy / they 100x prices.
  - nikanj 27d ago
    Or their AI chatbot decides you smell funny and bans you forever with 0 chance of appealing to a human
    - steveBK123 27d 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 27d 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. Dumping a bunch of bare files named things like: THE.ODYSSEY.2026.2160p.WEB-DL.DDP5.1.DV.HDR.H.265-GROUP.mkv into S3 buckets is probably a bad idea.

1970-01-01 27d ago

This is the only storage media I trust to outlive me. Everything else, including paper, will degrade.

thenthenthen 27d 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
- ButlerianJihad 27d ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965_MGM_vault_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965_MGM_vault_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_National_Archives_vault_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_National_Archives_vault_f... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire Also related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace#Music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace#Music 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]
  - HDBaseT 27d ago
    If M-DISCs were caught in a fire, I don't think they are readable either.
    - thenthenthen 26d ago
      Film is often stores in actual bunkers because its so dangerous

hndhyc0bdt 27d ago

Blu-ray again. It's always blu-ray.

mapontosevenths 27d 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. Some reading: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/yu4j1u/psa_verbatim_no_longer_sells_real_m_discs_now/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/yu4j1u/psa_ver... https://blu-raydisc.info/licensee-list/discmanuid-licenseelist.php# https://blu-raydisc.info/licensee-list/discmanuid-licenseeli... (search for verbatim and note the manufacturer column)

em500 27d 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.)
- 27d ago

m3kw9 27d 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?

Dabbling_Dion 27d ago

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shevy-java 27d 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).

mrandish 27d 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.

fenaer 27d 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 27d 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 27d 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 27d 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.

publlus_enigma 27d 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.

whateverboat 27d 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.

artmanja111 27d 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 27d 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.
RetroTechie 27d ago
Many hobbyist users don't check optical discs' contents after being written. Instead just rely on the "success" or "fail" provided by recording software. Or simply re-insert a written disc & take a glance at the directory structure. As opposed to read back an entire disc's contents & compare bit-for-bit with the source data. Read: discs could be bad on day 1. Or mostly ok but with some corrupted files in there. But user didn't check, notice or even care. Decades of storage don't improve anything (other than the data not being needed anyway).

rietta 27d 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 27d 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.)

hn_submit 27d 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.

bethekidyouwant 27d ago

When you die your kids are going to throw most of your stuff in the bin. Those discs especially.

publlus_enigma 27d ago
I've burned our home movies etc onto Bluray (BDMV) precisely because I think it's the easiest way to preserve these memories in a self a documenting way. What has a greater chance of being watched in the future? A disc labeled "Home Movies 2020-2022" that conforms to a wells documenting standard (even if it is obsolete in the future), versus a folder on a NAS that can only be accessed over SMB, or an account on a cloud storage service whose terms and authentication method may change without notice? I'd be willing to bet that the longevity and accessibility of the former outweighs the latter. All of these approaches require ongoing maintenance: the latter methods require maintenance against an environment that is actively changing and not self a documenting. I don't think we should underestimate the power of a physical object that can be inspected and transferred by anyone capable of manipulating and observing the world.

bunkydoo 27d ago

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