Comment by _m8fo
8 years ago
How is this any better than just burning your data to a blu-ray, which lasts centuries when stored under proper conditions (theoretically, anyway) I need to give this a closer look.
8 years ago
How is this any better than just burning your data to a blu-ray, which lasts centuries when stored under proper conditions (theoretically, anyway) I need to give this a closer look.
This is such a classic hacker news comment
Always a good time for linking the Show HN for Dropbox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
The second comment is the important one, where they completely miss the point of ease of use. (The first comment is right, installing stuff on a corporate comptuer is tricky.)
So let's look at ease of use! You need to have a server and separately manage GPG keys. Looks like an archival blu-ray wins on that front. (And yes I see where it's a goal to make this easy to use for everyone, it's not there yet.)
So whether tabeth is wrong or right to think it's of limited use, they are not fundamentally missing the point.
Not having to worry if there will be any Blu-Ray readers available in a century.
Seriously. The only device I have which can read a CD-ROM is my car. The PS4 can read Blu-Ray and DVD but not CD-ROM.
I would actually be far more comfortable with storing my data for archival on CD-ROM or DVDs than BluRay, since the former standards have been publicly and freely documented[1][2] from the physical properties up to the logical bits and bytes, while I don't believe the same exists for the latter.
In other words, anyone can, with enough engineering resources, create a drive capable of reading those discs, which is more than can be said of more proprietary formats.
[1]http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecm...
[2]https://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ec...
If you really need to read a CD-ROM then getting your hands on a SATA DVD-Drive, which usually are able to read CD-ROM, shouldn't be that big of a problem. Without looking hard I'd probably come up with 3 spare ones in my basement alone.
Tho I don't think that many of the self-burned CD's from 2 decades ago are still any good, I know mine usually ain't.
14 replies →
In a century I don’t even think we’d have CD/Blue-Ray. By then most of us would be dead already, so why worry?
I’m sure a graph of Time vs Value for data would have a significant dip shortly after creation, but on the scale of centuries it only goes up. (just look at the Dead Sea Scrolls).
>> Not having to worry if there will be any Blu-Ray readers available in a century.
Century? Startup sites like the one above last on average 6 months, that is, until they find out that their $6/mo DigitalOcean droplet suddenly costs... $10/mo! Or $100/mo or whatever and then they find out they cannot fund their $100/mo droplet and call it quits.
So... if you need the data to be around for 100 years, maybe not give it to the random startup.
It's an open-source project that has been around for nearly a decade, not some new startup.
This project started development 8 years ago.
https://github.com/camlistore/camlistore
M-DISC is even better. Burnable discs use an organic dye which oxidizes over time. M-DISC uses a "glassy carbon" layer that is inert to oxidation.
They adhere to DVD-R, BD-R, and BD-XL standards so it's readable in standard disc drives. You need a special drive to burn them, however (requires a high-power laser).
> Burnable discs use an organic dye which oxidizes over time.
This is only true of DVDs and a rare variant of Blu-Ray called LTH. Even cheap shitty Blu-Rays from Chinese manufacturers use inorganic dyes these days.
Also, the French Archives did a test of a variety of DVDs for longevity in adverse conditions and found that M-DISC didn't last significantly longer than competitors, even those with inorganic dyes: https://documents.lne.fr/publications/guides-documents-techn...
The US DoD also did a similar test under different conditions and found it performed much better than the competition though: http://www.esystor.com/images/China_Lake_Full_Report.pdf
I suspect the difference between the French and US tests might be the French using a longer test duration and the Americans using light. The French went up to 1000h while the Americans only went to 24 as far as I can tell.
And unlike DVDs, I haven't seen any studies of longevity for M-DISC Blu-Rays.
It's different (better?) in that it doesn't rely on you remembering to actually burn that data, then store it safely. It comes with an app you can run on your phone to upload all your photos immediately, for instance. It has importers to archive all your tweets automatically, for example. It allows you to outsource the task of "Keep this blu-ray safe" to a cloud provider (or a friend) while encrypting your data to keep it private.