With the recent losses within my family, I was inspired to finally take a deep dive into all the data hoarding my family has done over the years. Going through all these drives, I found media from over 20 years ago from my childhood, my parent’s youth, and my grandfather in his earlier(at least to me) years.
What I soon realized was that these archives were more precious to me than anything else in the world, and I had to do something to preserve this media for at least the rest of my life, with the hope that it last for many generations to come.
M-DISC: a data hoarders dream
As one might expect from a computer science person, I happen to have a thing for storage and storage mediums. Of the wierd technology that I keep around for god knows what, I have these Blu-ray optical disks called “M-DISCS”.
These ( at least the ones I have ) have a 50gb storage capacity each, which really isn’t a lot given the hoarding tendencies of my family tree. In addition, they suffer the same problems as all other optical disks, that being their slow burn speeds, and they also require some pretty proprietary technology which might not exists in the near future.
However, M-DISCS make up for all this with one simple goal: lasting forever without losing any data whatsoever. These disks, thanks to a special process that doesn’t age poorly, have a rough expected life expectancy of 1000 years.
I doubt that that I have any use for such a long time, but the assurance that these disks are not likely to fail give me some peace in knowing that these golden media records are safe from corruption.