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No way. Optical media suffer bitrot at a high rate compared to magnetic media. And the means to read it are quickly going obsolete.
That's what the m-disk is for I assume.
I wouldn't trust that either.
It's specifically what they're for. They're designed for archival purposes.
You can spiral off into techno-paranoia if you like, but that's just going to lead you to the conclusion that there are no solutions and nothing can be done. OP's looking for actual solutions so that's not helpful here.
I'm sorry, did I not provide a workable solution using magnetic media and periodic writes of new data? There's nothing paranoid about that. It's smart archiving.
You can spiral off into portraying my common-sense solution as hyperbolic bullshit, but that's just going to lead me to the conclusion that you didn't read or comprehend my recommendation. I provided an actual solution and what you said isn't helpful.
That's true, but for obvious reasons that hasn't been fully tested yet. Still, for just 10-30 years, it should probably work. Certainly better than a hard drive.
There are ways to artificially "age" media by accelerating the sorts of degradation pathways they'd be experiencing naturally during storage in normal conditions.
M-Disks are rated for one thousand years. Unlike other writable optical meida it doesn't use an organic substrate. It's carbon glass, very stable.
What's awesome is that no one alive today can disprove their marketing. I'll stick with the tech that we've been using for decades. You know, the one about which we have lots of data how it performs and degrades. Because we've manufactured hundreds of millions, or perhaps billions, of them. How many people do you know using M-DISCs and how many of them have had them for decades? I can answer the second part: zero, as they came to market in 2009.
Just throwing the 1000 years mark is a kinda of marketing. But the cool thing is there's actual science behind it.
The issue with writable optical discs is that the substrate is based on organic materials. These material, usually a cyano group, oxidize over time. You can help slow that down by keeping them out of the sun, prevent heat cycles, etc. But short of storing them in nitrogen they will eventually oxidize. What's more, CDs have their data layer completely exposed on top, making the problem even more pronounced. DVDs and Blu-ray at least have a layer of plastic on top of the data layer, but that's obviously still not 100% impermeable to oxygen.
M-Discs on the other hand use a carbon glass material for the data layer. Something that doesn't oxidize. Heat cycling night form cracks in it, so yeah I would avoid significant heat/cold cycles if you want them to last, but past that they should be really fucking stable.
It is 100 years? 500? 999? Maybe, but it's kind of irrelevant. In optimal storage conditions (which are easily achievable) they should last many lifetimes.
Great answer. Thanks for the educational content!
Thanks :)
I think they are kind of neat. Large volume cold storage is a big issue for home gamers/self hosters. Storage, at scale, can be very expensive and so hard to backup. Tapes are great, but incredibly fucking expensive (the tapes no so bad, but the drives are thousands of dollars... Used!) So I really wish high capacity BluRay M-Discs were more prevalent, market at scale would easily drive down the cost of the media, and the drives are/were already cheap. Unfortunately seeing the trajectory optical medias are in right now, that's very unlikely to happen :(
!remindme 1000 years
It’s pretty dependent on humidity and temperature, so a DVD buried in a well sealed plastic bag with a desiccant pack is actually in good conditions. No light, generally cool, and low humidity are perfect.
A hard drive has a lot of moving parts that must work and are basically impossible to replace. With optical media you’re just storing the platters, and I’m sure you’ll still be able to track down a drive somewhere. You can still find VHS players and those have been obsolete for 25 years.