Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

en.wikipedia.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 103 posts

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

#81

Post by hn_submit »

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.

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

#82

Post by hn_submit »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #23

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-as…

> Verbatim, who owns M-Disc, doesn't even manufacture discs anymore. They just slap their brand on other peoples discs.

Isn't that the case with all Western manufacturers these days? They buy stuff from China and slap their label on it. Management has no affinity with engineering and technology, all they know is marketing.

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

#83

Post by RetroTechie »

artmanja111 wrote: post #72

~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…

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).

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

#84

Post by asdff »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #23

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-as…

Kind of interesting how analog media is still the best archival media. Throw your data on a stone tablet it's going to last 10,000 years.

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

#85

Post by bethekidyouwant »

steveBK123 wrote: post #49
laweijfmvo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

surely AI will just recode the entire system in minutes?

Yes, AI will simply vibe code drivers for devices it can't talk to in order to read formats it can't read More likely it will just hallucinate content that plausibly could be on the disc and display that for the unwitting

Why would it not be able to talk to it? Clearly the io pinns can be connected forever…

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

#87

Post by HDBaseT »

steveBK123 wrote: post #49
laweijfmvo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

surely AI will just recode the entire system in minutes?

Yes, AI will simply vibe code drivers for devices it can't talk to in order to read formats it can't read More likely it will just hallucinate content that plausibly could be on the disc and display that for the unwitting

I think we'll have the hallucination problems solved in a 1000 years. One would hope at least.

If 1000 year AI cannot write firmware & drivers for fairly standard discs, then AI has failed massively.

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

#88

Post by SchemaLoad »

asdff wrote: post #84
mapontosevenths wrote: post #23

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-as…

Kind of interesting how analog media is still the best archival media. Throw your data on a stone tablet it's going to last 10,000 years.

I think it's more the size of the data rather than digital vs analog. you could have digital data stored on punch cards or say a large array of dip switches and it would last ages, but the storage density is terrible. Meanwhile disks and ssds store massive amounts of data on a very tiny space but it's prone to corruption over time.

Punch cards that are laser cut from metal would probably outlast stone tablets.

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

#89

Post by ricardobeat »

ButlerianJihad wrote: post #20
ricardobeat wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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-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 ba…

> 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.

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

#90

Post by publlus_enigma »

bethekidyouwant wrote: post #86

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

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.

Post reply on HN