This optical disc will keep your gumble safe for 2,000 YEARS

Let see you keep that warranty

hmmm, 2000 years. I have trouble getting some companies to meet there 1 year guarantee obligations.

It will be intresting to see someone try it in 4013 if it turns out not to work.

I don't care about 2,000 years at this point. If it can keep the archives for the better part of ten years and not break the bank in so doing, perhaps we can (at least for the medium term) use something that doesn't have to rely on spinning rust for consumer backup.

How do they work this out? Or have they got a DeLorean time machine that they haven't told us about?

A positive step

My personal feeling is that if the media is rated for that long, there will be some effort made to make sure that, at least in the medium term, that the media can be read.

Couple this with the fact that it is piggy-backing on a consumer level technology, and should be able to be read on any BD-XL drive means that there is a higher chance that devices will continue to be made into the near future (decades) that will read it. I know that it is not really a good comparison, but CDs are still readable in current generation BluRay readers, so that shows that a medium with sufficient market penetration can still be readable nearly four decades later.

I know that this is not anything like the 1000 years specified for this media, but it is suitable for medium term (decades) archive of financial data in a way that current generations of disk/tape technology is not.

I'm not going to suggest that we should stop using durable physical media for the intelectual riches of our society, however, because when the technology fall happens, anything that is not readable by eye will be useless anyway!

Reminds me

of that problem they had over in, was it Sweden? Where they were building the sub-subterranean nuclear waste storage facility.

The plan was to fill it in and hide it forever, but the concern was, how do we let people know in 10,000 years time that hey, don't fucking dig here or you'll die horribly?

The concept was that in 10,000 years time the human language may have changed so much as to be unrecognisable to what we have today, so a few signs wouldn't work nor last the time span.

They were trying to think of monuments they could build that would last and would clearly indicate, regardless of language, 'danger'.

Maybe that's what stonehenge was? A big storage dump for nasty shit and those were meant to keep us out. Would explain why so many of the hippies that go there are fucking nutjobs.

Re. Re. Reminds me

Sounds like what happened a while back in goiana with the radiotherapy machine that got dismantled for scrap and the pretty glowing death crystals of what turned out to be 137Cs... then got melted down and ended up in concrete rebars in people's homes.

Verbatim? Shudder...

Had some 5.25" floppies from them when I had a CBM Pet + 2031 disk drive back in the early 80s. They all failed after not very long. In the late 90s, a place I worked for had some Verbatim 3.5" disks. They were well dodgy as well. So, unless their attention to quality has vastly improved recently, I wouldn't place any bets on their 100Gb stuff lasting more than 10 years at best.

YMMV

It's just unfortunate...

...That the designs for building a replica drive to read one of these discs, 2000 years from now, were written with Microsoft Office 2013.

Keep your gumble safe

I misread this as "keep your grumble safe". Further checks show they may both be applicable.

Keep your grumble safe

So did I actually.

And I'm not even sure what either is.

(and too afraid to look it up in case I get a 'visit' at 6 a.m tomorrow).

Well, in a few hundred years, you might not have a player for these disks, but at least they will still be going strong as cool and retro, by hanging from your rear view space ship screen thingy.

Yes, but in 10 years or 20

There will be a gazillion byte long term storage device that will allow you to use a auto feeding reader for the old rubbish 100GB discs that you have to all be transferred to one new one.

Then, you or your children can make the next transfer 10 years later so that that photo you took at a party no-one is even alive to remember can be preserved for the future anthropologists to ponder why people carried devices on sticks to point at themselves in the first place.

What data is required to be kept a millennium?, we have very few, like the Magna Carta, but they are still only of historical interest - losing them wouldn't remove the rights they didn't give us (I am not a Baron).

However, 30/40/50 years without having to be re-recorded to ensure integrity, very useful. The British library and, no doubt, the future Youtube will care.

The very few things worth preserving for 2000 years

can be chiseled onto a bunch of rocks.

The rest of it, just be glad our descendants do not see them. Otherwise, they'd be that much more ashamed of us.

One word

Bullshit.

What happens...

...when you scratch it in twenty years' time, or snap disk 2 of 5 after a century?

Look at the condition of pretty much everything in existence that's more than a few decades old, and it should be obvious that even cryogenic vaults of these disks aren't going to make it long.

The Paperless Office

The promise of the paperless office pretty much guarantees that despite all the masses of ?useless? data we create, the history of the last few generations may be completely lost in a few hundred years time. I wonder what the clay tablet scribes thought of the new-fangled papyrus scrolls when they first saw them? Probably "that'll never last" :-)

For those who think long term

I really don't understand the short-termism evident here. I can back-up my entire music collection onto a 50GB disk and then forget about worrying about dead drives for the next 30 years.

I took 25,000 photos last year so that also would seem suitable for some permanent storage so I can be worry free. I have copied my daughters photos from 2005 when she was touring in South America onto an Mdisc and feel happy she will be able to look at them in 50 years time when she is in her dotage.

And I think there could be a business case for storing them in a vault with my will : ) in case the house burns down.

I already have an external M-writer so I can use it with any of my machines

Future readability

Some people want a storage medium that is entirely passive and does not include electronics. The number of available options for meet this requirement is surprisingly small - and most of them come in the form of a 12cm shiny disc.

This physical format has been commercially available since 1982. Yes, 33 years. An eternity in technology. Whenever the format has been upgraded the physical form remained the same and any new readers are compatible with all previous formats sharing this shape. I see little reason for any future passive storage media to break this long continuity and change to a different form factor.

While these readers are no longer as ubiquitous as they used to be because networking has made them less important, I don't foresee any real problem obtaining them for a long time to come.