The music industry traded tape for hard drives and got a hard-earned lesson.

My father told me he wanted to make USB flash drives of all the scanned and digitized family photos and other assorted letters and mementos. He planned to distribute them to all family members hoping that at least one set would survive. When I explained that they ought to be recipes to new media every N number of years or risk deteriorating or becoming unreadable (like a floppy disk when you have no floppy drive), he was genuinely shocked. He lost interest in the project that he’d thought was so bullet proof.

  • LarmyOfLone@lemm.eeEnglish
    42·
    3 months ago

    M-Disk is rated to last like 100 1000 years. They are also working on a 125 Terabyte CD. Optical storage is the way to go.

      • LarmyOfLone@lemm.eeEnglish
        3·
        3 months ago

        Well yeah but BluRay is still much more expensive and smaller capacity. Lets hope this new 125TB disk works out

      • kalleboo@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        3 months ago

        The main cause of bitrot in older disks is the organic dyes fading (aside from REALLY cheap disks where delamination was a problem), whereas M-Disc uses an inorganic carbon material

    • feedum_sneedson@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      3 months ago

      Was it sapphire or something? But one and done. I wonder if you could just keep writing and just “cross-out” the old stuff with that kind of capacity.

      • LarmyOfLone@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        Not sure what sapphire means, but here is the article. Just appending records and differential backups would seem to be the way to go.

        the new optical disks are claimed to be “highly stable so there are no special storage requirements.” The researchers tout an expected shelf life of 50 to 100 years