ot: good for 1000 years....

Chienworks wrote on 7/2/2015, 7:21 AM

I often ponder how much media produced today will be viewed or of any interest at some future point. I know we cherish movies and records from 100 years ago, but a big part of that isn't because of their quality or relevance so much as there just wasn't much produced back then, and there is less that has survived. I wouldn't be surprised if nearly as much video is recorded each day now as in the entire 20th century. Probably a magnitude more pictures are taken every day than in the entire 19th century. Most likely the overwhelming majority of it is seen a grand total of 2.41 times and then forgotten, often deleted, but often not, just sitting there occupying bits on storage cards forever. Who will wade through it all 1000, or 100, or even 10 years from now? How much of it ends up in the dump as devices are recycled? How much of it just sits in a drawer, never noticed again?

Kinda hit me hard yesterday as i was updating computers in the room of a teacher who had just retired. The janitors were preparing for the new teacher. There was a large bulletin board over the desk covered with decades of memorabilia, notes, pictures, cards, trinkets, that the teacher had collected from students and meaningful events over her career. I'm sure every one of them was important at the time and brought back many fond memories ... and i watched it all get torn down and tossed in the trash can. I suppose some teachers would be more likely to take a few choice items home with them (maybe she had), or even hoard them all in a box somewhere. But what about people who have died? Do descendents and friends going through the stuff left behind have any clue what's worth preserving? Do they even know where to look on phones, hard drives, tablets, discs, SD cards and would they even bother if they did know? Maybe the meaning of most of it dies with the person.

So, of the innumerable petabytes of media produced this decade, how much of any of it will not only survive, but even be noticed down the road?

Dexcon wrote on 7/2/2015, 7:41 AM

This is great news ... I'm now confident that I'll be able to revisit my 20th and 21st century work in a future life.

More seriously, this is good news in that M-disc seems like a much more reliable method of preserving records for the distant future. Floppy disks, tape, DVDs, BDs have a limited life as pointed out in the article. And then there's the question of whether or not there'll be any hardware in the future to play any of these medias, including M-disc. For instance, how easy these days is it to find hardware to play a relatively recent Betamax tape or a 5.25" floppy if you don't already own functional equipment for that format.

But the good part of it is that humankind has had an incredible history of deciphering ancient languages and dialects from surviving media (e.g. dead sea scrolls, hieroglyphics). And code-breaking as well (e.g. Enigma).

So if the media itself can endure 1000 years, then there's a reasonable chance that our far future descendants will have a greater chance of gaining a better understanding and appreciation (for better or for worse) of 20th and 21st century life.

But please ... don't ever ever commit "Lost" to M-disc - otherwise the 31st century people will instantly lose the will to live.

EDIT: My post was added before I had seen Chienworks post. While I agree regarding domestic, I am seeing a huge advantage for cultural, business and government organisations. Think of institutions and repositories like the Vatican library, the Melk library in Austria, the British museum, etc etc etc. There is just so much that needs to be preserved in as many forms as as possible.

DGates wrote on 7/2/2015, 7:42 AM

These would be great for masters. Or even for client copies if you compensate for the higher price. It would be cool to get a pressed-quality Blu-ray that you simply burn in your own computer.

Chienworks wrote on 7/2/2015, 8:16 AM

Agreed about the cultural/historical stuff.

As far as there being players for these discs, i think that's very likely. Floppies died a natural death after their short life cycle because they were flawed and limited. No one *wanted* to use them anymore! With M-Disc the desire will be there. Also, barring some apocalyptic tragedy, the knowledge and ability to build new drives will remain, as well as the incentive to do so since so much information will be stored on those discs. Floppy drives aren't made anymore because there's no pressure or desire for them, not because they're old.

Vint Cerf recently published an article in which he claimed that everyone should print out all their digital photos NOW!, before we lose the ability to open them anymore because some new format pushes out the current one and new software no longer has decoders for today's formast. I think he's being very short sighted there. There are so many pictures and important pieces of art saved as .jpg, .gif, .png, .bmp, .raw, etc. now, and the software and knowledge of the coding already exists distributed around the whole community that it's unlikely these formats will ever become unsupported. It's true that in the early days of digital imaging each company had it's own proprietary image format and most of these have fallen by the wayside, but the current formats used have effectively become public domain by now. 12cm optical discs have reached a similar stage of ubiquitousness that they too will survive.

JJKizak wrote on 7/2/2015, 8:31 AM

When an old family member dies the thousands of saved photos stashed in the drawers will be discarded rather quickly as the kids do not want them. (Been their, done that) If they were recorded on one disc they would most probably be saved.
JJK

deusx wrote on 7/2/2015, 9:16 AM

The original DVDs and CDs were supposed to last 1000 years too, but as most of you know a lot of them died after less than 5 years.

These claims are always nonsense, so don't worry about it too much.

I'd like to see some realism here too. They test it and say.: "This will last at least 163 years, 23 days and 17 hours", but no, they always come up with a big round number like a 1000.

DGates wrote on 7/2/2015, 11:13 AM

Funny thing is, if all the CD and DVD media of the past came in those clunky DVD-RAM cartridges, durability would have been awesome. Scratches and finger prints would have been a non-issue.

riredale wrote on 7/2/2015, 11:47 AM

No, premium CD and DVD blanks WILL last a long time, as previous threads have discussed. Some DVD dyes are junk, however, and the "Great Quality" CD blanks I bought for my daughter's music collection back in the days of 6X CD burners began flaking their aluminum backing in a year or so.

But the Verbatims and TYs (and hopefully the Falcons) will live a very long time. Not so much for the Riteks.

Anyway, having had a heart valve replaced a few months ago (feeling much better, thank you) and getting a first-hand view of my eventual demise, I am happy knowing that the stuff I create will be good for a couple of generations of humans. After that, hardly anyone is going to remember much of my brilliant work, let alone care. Not because they are callous but rather because they will have innumerable other issues far more important to their daily lives.

john_dennis wrote on 7/2/2015, 3:27 PM

"[I]I'd like to see some realism here too. They test it and say.: "This will last at least 163 years, 23 days and 17 hours", but no, they always come up with a big round number like a 1000.[/I]"

If I remember the details of "significant digits" (doubtful) from my 1970 Chemical Calculations class, a zero is not considered significant, but rather a place holder. By that standard, the disks could last 1 year (the only significant digit in the bunch) or 1999 years.

I don't know how many people in the world have to worry about the uncertainty of numerical data these days. I've noticed a lot of spreadsheet data presented to four or more decimal places even though the original measurements were made with instruments that were barely accurate to one decimal place. My local traffic authority seems to understand the concept of significant digits, though. I see signs on stoplights that state a red light violation will cost the offender $283. Now that's unambiguous.

I've been saving my own photo-video-personal data archive to two 2TB hard drives on separate machines and, based on my current growth rate, I will have to get two larger hard drives in the next few months or split the data across four drives. I bought the two drives in 2011. Before that, it was two 750 GB, before that, two 300 GB, before that two 120 GB.

One of my Blu-ray writers is M-Disc capable. The difficulty for me, other than the cost of materials and time, is deciding how to slice and dice the material into 25 GB chunks to fit on ~80 M-Disks. What to leave in, what to leave out?

Geoff_Wood wrote on 7/2/2015, 4:36 PM

You probably won't need to worry about that. Life As We Know It may come to an end in the next hundred years or so.

But the M-Discs may last 20 years or more where a common-or-garden DVDR may or may not.

Happy days .... ;-|

geoff

ushere wrote on 7/2/2015, 6:53 PM

If they were recorded on one disc they would most probably be saved.

that is if anyone remembered where, or even if there was a disk in the first place ;-)

CJB wrote on 7/2/2015, 10:49 PM

I have had gold CD disk media go bad in less than 10 years. Looked like swiss cheese when held up to light....It is nice to know that M-disk will last that long..... do I have anything worth saving...?