Had anyone here used M-disc? I think this is probably the best solution for me, but I feel it is a bit if painting myself into a corner
Optical Media Durability (2020)
11–15 of 15 posts
Re: Optical Media Durability (2020)
#12Is anyone doing this kind of research on SD cards?
I'm more interested in reads than exhausting the write cycles. I wonder what the "half-life" of each bit/byte is: years? centuries? And how much better are DVDs, fx.
I've never had a Blu-Ray fail on me, for what it's worth.
Re: Optical Media Durability (2020)
#13Is anyone doing this kind of research on SD cards? I'm more interested in reads than exhausting the write cycles. I wonder what the "half-life" of each bit/byte is: years? centuries? And how much better are DVDs, fx. I've never had a Blu-Ray fail on me, for what it's worth.
Research? I'm not.
Physics? I can tell you it's far from permanent. You have charge stored surrounded by insulator. You quantum tunnel it in. Over time, it leaks out. Anecdotally, I've had plenty fail. All else being equal, higher-density devices should fail more quickly in theory (but practice is often different from theory, and all else is rarely equal).
Sorry.
Upside: Periodically reading / re-writing should reset all the ones to ones and all the zeros to zeros.
What I've always wanted was a hundred slot SD/CF card reader, which could access them all at once.
Re: Optical Media Durability (2020)
#14I still do backups of my online storage to Blu-ray on occasion. You can get 25GB, 50GB, or 100GB discs, and it’s great insurance in case anything happens to Google Drive or whatnot… like last week… Flash drives are cool too, but Blu-ray Discs will never have an accidental folder deletion or any temptation to be used as more than an archive…
Is your can stomach the upfront costs a tape drive is even better - tape has a much better durability record, but man are recent tape drives expensive.
My understanding, though, is that you have to keep them at room temperature? (I recall a suggested rule of thumb for LTO is 60-90 degrees – most certainly wardrobe or basement media, rather than storage unit media.)
Re: Optical Media Durability (2020)
#15The author's most recent update, from 2023: https://blog.dshr.org/2023/08/optical-media-durability-updat...
> Last year I found a NetBSD1.2 CD dating from October 1996 whose cksum(1) checksums all verified correctly despite a few read errors. That CD was still delivering good data after nearly 26 years, but this year a couple of the checksums failed.
I appreciate the level of attention to this problem.