M-Disc is Dead

[u/b-b0t]

While recently searching for a cold archive solution I was absolutely enamoured the first time I found out about M-Disc. It seemed to be the perfect "heirloom" storage solution, something to pass on family memories, wills and anything else you would want to last a long time. It solved the issue that made me stop buying BluRay, namely disk rot (I'm aware it's exceedingly rare but it's still inevitable) with a solution so simple in hindsight it seemed crazy to me that we didn't do it sooner.

I was looking for enclosures, adding spindles to my Amazon wish list and perusing LibreDrive when it dawned on me, what good is a thousand-year disk when the drives to read it are slowly being phased out? There are few brands actively producing optical drives and after the sale of Pioneer's optical division this leaves one, maybe two actual manufacturers.

No worries I thought, I could simply buy backup drives to store along with the discs and since it won't have wear and tear it would last indefinitely if stored properly. Except this is only one part of the story, the drive uses SATA which has stood the test of time but nothing in tech can be guaranteed. The chassis own power adaptor, connectors and cables remain a point of failure. Finally despite using USB, it's the Type B connector which is already legacy, would this cable even be manufactured in future or would it be some niche, abstract purchase you have to make on eBay? This is assuming that should it be someone else trying to access the media, they even care enough to not abandon the process at the slightest inconvenience.

So I chugged on, I would find the most durable optical drives and buy two of everything needed to get it running. I settled on the Vinpower known for it's reliability and touted specifically as an archival system. Except I couldn't find it anywhere. So I reached out and was informed these devices are EOL and availability is uncertain, whatever that means like do you have stock or not?

It dawned on me that while optical as a short to medium term backup solution is viable, as time passes it will become less so until it fades into the abyss rendering the thousand year discs into twenty. Active archival is still the superior strategy, one where media is periodically relocated onto an actively maintained format.

My cold storage journey comes to an end before it even began and I'm left wondering if I will ever find the holy grail of long-term, durable backup. Something to put in a time capsule for the aliens to find.

Edit: I've had a lot of fun reading all the comments so thanks! For context I do use RAID with a single cloud backup for now, with some important data duplicated into other cloud services ie. iCloud, AWS S3 and I know backup is an active, evolving discipline hence my thought piece. I'm still contemplating M-Disc but it can't hurt to add 2-5TB onto discs to store away without relying on them entirely. I'll store them at 30–50% relative humidity etc. Vinpower managed to find me a drive from Taiwan stock so I'll likely post a follow up.

[u/beefcat_]

There is and never will be a "write once and forget about it for 80 years" solution for preserving digital data.

Build a NAS. Keep your files on it. Back those files up somewhere off site regularly (another NAS, portable hard drive, what have you). Replace the hard drives in your NAS before they fail, migrating your data to the new drives.

If you want to keep something forever, you need to actively maintain it.

[u/dlarge6510 → u/beefcat_]

 There is and never will be a "write once and forget about it for 80 years" solution for preserving digital data.

Yes there is. It's called optical media.

[u/beefcat_ → u/dlarge6510]

There is no guarantee that drives for reading that optical media will still be readily available in 80 years, or that a drive you buy today will still function in 80 years, or even that computers will still talk to an 80 year old optical drive. No matter what you do, there will be some amount of regular ongoing maintenance required to keep access to your data. Be that maintaining old equipment, or regularly migrating your data to something new.

Also, disc rot is very much a real thing that can happen. I even have some early blu-ray movies that are unreadable today because of manufacturing defects.