Interesting. I hadn't heard of M-Disc. Thanks for the link! The worry of not being able to find a device to read/play back your media is a common one for all s

Interesting. I hadn't heard of M-Disc. Thanks for the link! The worry of not being able to find a device to read/play back your media is a common one for all storage types, analog and digital. For example, we have hundreds of reels of quarter inch tape from the fifties and sixties down in our library. The tapes themselves are safe (some may need a day in an easy-bake oven), but otherwise they still sound great. We recently had our Studer A-820 refurbished and it's probably in better than new condition, but I worry there won't be any people to do the service, or parts to do the service with if it needs attention in ten years. The more obscure, the medium, the trickier it gets. We have a bunch of early digital recordings stored on Betamax tapes, that need both a working Betamax deck and a PCM encoder-decoder box in order to be read. Fortunately, those have all been transferred now. This is why I'm a believer in thinking of maintaining an archive as being an active rather than static process. It's important to be periodically re-evaluating your digital assets to make sure they can be losslessly transferred to current file formats and modern storage media. It was probably never a good idea to simply "put it on a shelf and forget about it", but thankfully with digital assets, these migrations can be lossless, automated, and tested.