Anyone using M-DISC to archive snaps?

Solves only the easy problem

I'm quite prepared to believe M-DISK is as durable (or close enough) as they claim, but I'm afraid it does not help much. What do you (or your grandchildren) read it with 50 years from now? I could be that compatible DVD drives will exist, but that is not guaranteed.

A better idea is to save them on good-quality regular DVD:s, then be prepared to copy the data 10 years from now to the then-popular format. And so on.

As it happens, some time ago I scanned some colour photographs from my childhood, about 50 years old. Some of them had colour casts on them and were a bit faded, but the "restoration" button of the software bundled with the scanner made them look almost as good as new. Reading any digital record from the same era would have been a major project (google for heroic efforts to extract data from old NASA tapes).

The website seems strangely vague about what they actually are.

Are they just Bluerays with a more stable data layer on the disc?

Media works … DVD a bit tight for all you snaps.

I bought some M-Disc DVD media to archive data of a business being shuffled off. Tax records need only last 7 years (IIRC) so the 1000 years seems like a good bet.

The data were "engraved" in much the same way as any data DVD. Only "downside" is that they are not as easily labelled as conventional DVD-R(W) with no "printable" surface.

At 4.6GB, it won't store more than a couple of thousand decent-resolution snaps. It's not even enough for some people's snap-happy holidays where evrything is photographed; just in case. Then to be sure. To be sure.

There's Blu-Ray media available as well; in 2 capacities (so far). Not all M-Disc drives will engrave those; but you'd fit tens of gigabytes onto each disc.

For pictures worth saving, the DVD size is probably an easy, affordable option.

My oldest colour film negatives are off-colour; some a flaking pigment. Some of the older collection of family shots back to the 1960's is "infected" by spots. I'd rather leave the scanned films "uncorrected" other than for the obvious colour shifts. If somebody wants to subsequently re-touch digitally, that art's up to them.

By all means, put your pictures on your NAS, or whatever. Choose the ones to keep "forever" and back them up to M-Dics if they are worth preserving. Don't worry about how somebody might have difficulty recovering them in 750 years. Or even 50 years. You can only do what you do and it's betetr to back up now than after the NAS has taken a tumble off the shelf.

Physical colour films, unless stored carefully, will be largely useless after a century; monochrome's a bit more stable but don't count on it lasting more than a century under average storage conditions.

More to the point perhaps is the use for family histories; family trees including pictures,, scans of certificates and other historic addenda. Never store family tree data only in proprietary databse formats. Always save in at least two other "open" formats; preferably human-readable ones (e.g. XML-based). Take the time to produce PDF's of charts, etc.

Label the media. Put it in a protective case with documentation about the contents and the method used to create them. Store sensibly.

Just upload them to facebook or twitter.

Think about ease of updates.

Long term data storage requires curation, so you should (IMHO) look for a solution that is easy to curate. Some cloud backup providers (like CrashPlan) allows you to backup to their cloud, as well as a friend's remote crashplan hard disk. Using something like this, it's then easy to take an initial backup of the NAS locally, attach that backup to a friends crashplan account, from where it will keep backing up. It has the added advantage that it can be restored even if the central provider is down/gone out of business etc.

Yes, you need to re-visit the solution every 5-10 years, but it's easier copying everything of a single or pair of large hard disks, than a stack of many many DVDs. However long they are optically good, you will need to replace the hardware that can read them every 10 years or so, as well as testing it every year or two. (IME, optical drives are very unreliable! )

One thing I do know is that you don't want to use spirit-based pens or sticky labels on CDs/DVDs because the solvent buggers them over time. Not a lot of time at that. You want a water-based marker if you absolutely *have* to mark the disc itself.

No idea how these M-Disc things will fare; but I wouldn't want to risk marking them.

As for long-term storage, I'd go for 2/3x copies of your NAS on external HDDs in a safety deposit box (or multiple boxes). That'll work for as long as we're all using USB, and 2/3 copies ought to provide some protection against bitrot. You could save as-is or as RAID sets; but RAID changes, so there's a risk of not being able to disentangle them in the future. Same with encryption. You do have to get out of your comfy chair though. If USB is replaced by a new standard, copy the files to the new toys. Rinse and repeat.

Wrong at the most basic level.

The idea that someone wants to look at your* shite in 50 years time.

* Not you personnaly, your as in any random person, ask feacalbook how much 5 year old data is accessed on their narcissistic media platform.

I have personal experience of a three score and ten archive medium.

The best feature when accessing really important personal information, is the automatic embellish function.

Data =/= Information

As someone who has worked on 300 year old documents, and also realised he has no recollection of where the slides of him as a child were taken or who the 'other person' in the frame was, can I suggest that tranches of data are documented and individual files are annotated if there is likely to be doubt to a future viewer. Storage tech in 25 years will be 10 times more whizzy than now (so perhaps prompting a change from all archive eggs in one technology basket) but you might not recognise any of the things the grand children are showing you and asking about.

The more the merrier

The more people who put their personal data archives onto the one medium, using the same or similar protocols, the more motivation there will be in 900 year's time to have a working reader.

Having said that, I'm not really sure that anything much I have is actually worth preserving for 1000 years in a digital format. Although three is a chap (who was on the BBC Radio 4's 'Saturday Live') who is collecting an archive of 'ordinary people's' diaries (definitely NOT politicians) for future generations of social historians. (A shame my aunt's 'wicked stepmother' burnt her wartime teenage diaries, really.)

How about another NAS? Or several USB HDD?

Depending on your data volume, how about a 2nd NAS off-site. First sync it locally, then use rsync or similar to copy over changes every so often. If your NASs support snapshots (e.g. FreeNAS using ZFS) then you can replicate a snapshot without worrying about changes mid-backup. Also ZFS snapshots take almost no space, only the *changes* need it, so you can have a scheduled snapshot regime to deal with cryptolocker virus, etc.

If that is not viable, and your data totals less then a few TB, then just get a few USB HDD and cycle them round syncing to your NAS. Set up an encrypted file system if you want, of course, buf if the risk of loss of password and/or FS support is greater than the data value and physical security risk, then don't. Your call...

How much data do you have?

Sony has been working on something similar called Optical Disk Archive (ODA). It uses a sealed car-audio-type disc cartridge containing 11 discs (not individually accessible) and the cartridge appears as an LTFS volume (of up to 3.3TB). Sony says it will keep data for 50 years, but of course, will there be readers for the discs in 50 years? Drives are USB3 (standalone) and FC (inside Sony Petasite libraries)

How about BD-R HTL?

A much cheaper alternative is BD-R HTL - 'only' lasts 100-150 years, but it's a fraction of the cost - £0.33 per 25GB as opposed to £4.40 per 25GB for the m-disc.

In my opinion, BD-R HTL makes more sense for backing up things that no-one will care about in 150 years. Yes, your descendents may be interested in your family photographs in the future but will they be willing to spend thousands of pounds on one of the few remaining drives capable of reading the format? In no more than two generations whichever format you chose will be obsolete and your kids or grandkids will have copied the files to the latest archival formats and media - or just as likely, binned the disks.

1000 years is overkill, especially at 13x the price. For governments, large museums, libraries and archives M-Disc makes sense, but for the average home user not so such.

Still a bit early to say...

...given I've only been using them a couple of years. Even good quality DVD+R will last that long. So far no complaints but I do have a few observations:

Firstly, they're not universally compatible. Some regular drives will read M-DISC, some won't. Personally I don't see this a a show stopper - potentially having to jump through a few hoops for long archived data is to be expected - but if you're expecting the data can be retrieved with just any drive then you can't be assured of that.

Secondly until fairly recently media distribution here in the UK was poor, and you were gouged as a consequence. Things have improved noticeably over the last quarter or so but pricing still seems significantly higher than it should be compared to the US or Japan even by the usual IT industry standard. Hopefully that will continue to improve if the format gains traction.

Finally the drives run warm when burning. Most consumer level optical drives have problems if you try to burn 20-30 discs in quick succession but that is amplified for M-DISC. If you're planning on burning a lot of discs in one go it is something to bear in mind, the media is pricey enough that a bad burn is annoying. This mini-ITX workstation has a laptop style M-DISC Bluray fitted and I tend to keep that to one disc at a time to be on the safe side (5.25" form factor drives aren't quite as fussy). The drive in question (LG BT-30N) has actually been taken off the market. I wonder why when there doesn't appear to be a direct replacement in the range?

To be honest I'm using it as just another option now. The early signs are encouraging enough but the important stuff is still going on both M-DISC and DVD-RAM. I've been using DVD-RAM for well over 10 years now and even the oldest stuff is still perfectly readable. I do check my archives over the Christmas break every year and didn't find any cause for concern a couple of weeks ago. Those are supposedly rated for 30 years rather than 1000, but that's more than long enough to extend to the next format shift. I take it you're no longer storing data on Travan tapes or SyQuest disks?

From an archiver

I also work in the archiving field, both electronic and paper/photos. I also use M-DISCs, both DVD and now BluRay.

A few notes in abbreviated form follow.

Although M-DISCs can only be written on certain drives, they can be read on virtually any drive.

The main advantage is that they are READ-ONLY, not RW like disks. Yes, slower, but safer.

They help avoid silent corruption:

-Bad sectors in magnetic media.

-Unknown corruption (cosmic rays, etc.)

-Oops, system crashed and mangled file-system, or part of file-system.

-Oops, bug in file-system that mangles something.

-Errors in copying (Rare, yes, but I've seen it happen.)

Always perform a compare of discs to the original:

-Shut down and re-start to avoid reading from cache.

-Test 100% of data/whole disc.

Printing family trees, etc:

- Use laser printers on acid-free paper. You don't want inks to fade.

General archival notes:

-Burn two copies of every M-DISC if you really do care about what is on them.

-DO NOT USE PLASTIC unless you want to take chances with "archival quality" plastics. Toner loves to stick to plastic after a while.

-Avoid staples and paper clips (most will rust.)

-Write on the center of the disc, where there is no data recorded.

-Do not use "Sharpie" pens.

-ONLY use pens made specifically for writing on archival media.

-ONLY use pens with archival quality ink when writing on paper.

http://www.sp.se/en/index/services/rec_paper/sidor/default.aspx

And as others have said: cull the data and save what is important/meaningful. A few thousand good pictures with meta-data are more meaningful than 100,000 pictures with no information.

Never on the shelf, always live.

Take it from someone who's been there for a long time.

As others mentioned, it's not the durability of the media, it's the mere existence of the technology. By the time you need to read the archive, you find that there is no compatible hardware anywhere but in a museum.

On the other hand, when it's on a NAS plus in the "cloud", you are forced to keep up with progress. When the NAS gives ghost, you'll have to get a current piece of tech, and restore all your data there. When the cloud provider dies you'll have to move to a new one.

Just make sure that you keep three copies "normally", and no less than two during the migration.

1000 years is an impossible claim

So if they are making that kind of claim, how can you believe anything else about them, or their service?

As I've said very recently here in this forum, data is difficult.

There is no "roadmap" for data accessibility. There's at least four problems:-

1. Durability of the medium (e.g., optical disks that decay)

2. Availability of the hardware to read the media. (e.g., who remembers Zip disks, and Syquest cartridges?)

3. Ability to decode the file format. (e.g., Who remembers the DIF file format, which was supposed to be universal?)

4. Interpreting that data for use by a program. (A classic example of this is Microsoft's backup utility in DOS days which was incompatible even between its own DOS versions).

One might say that everything should be put into a unified format, but what format would that be?

The nuances of certain media types is lost as soon as this is done. For example, backing up data from Psion Organiser data cartridges (which used UV erasable EPROMS) would need some documentation spelling out the way that old data is not erased but appended to, due to the method of recording, for example. The unified format will no doubt have its own quirks.

What is certain is that everything has to have a "Review Date" set on it, regardless of which of the four categories mentioned above being dealt with.

Ad Hoc updates

One of the problems with software publisher's ad hoc updates is that it might render data archived before that date unreadable. Those updates coming down the pipe on a regular basis are all very well for other purposes (maybe), but what we as users should be doing is to match a backup of the data with the version of software that has just been superceded. But then, that version of the software might not work on the OS currently in use...

So if HMRC come knocking on the door about your accounts from 5 years ago, can you oblige? The conventional answer is that the records are stored on paper, but we are entering an era where that is not going to be viable.

While M-DISC's marketing is genius in that it makes long term data storage look easy for consumers, the IT industry already has this figured out -- and experts (librarians) already have protocols for this.

1. Choose the best combination of $$/stored-bit and standardization (to ensure future compatability).

2. Store multiple copies in multiple locations.

3. Make sure to copy your data before the equipment becomes a museum piece.

If you were my customer, I would advise you to pick up the latest LTO-7 drive and a box of tapes for around $3k. That's 6TB per tape!

As a cheapskate IT pro my recommendation is slightly altered: Pick up a used LTO-5 drive and a box of new tapes for around USD $800. 1.5TB per tape ...

LTO tapes (standard media) last 15 to 30 years depending on storage conditions and media quality.

While it is tempting to be attracted to Blu-ray because you can picture yourself popping a CDROM from the late 90's in a contemporary Blu-ray drive, it is highly unlikely this form of storage will be available in consumer devices 15 years hence.

If you have even a few TB of data those M-DISC's begin to look both difficult to deal with (they're so small!) and much less economical than LTO.

M-DISC great but finding compatible drives not so clear

I've been looking into this too but have found the information about which drives support which M-DISCs not easy to obtain.

M-DISC have a drive list http://www.mdisc.com/m-ready/ but I would check the manufacturer's specs as there is bound to be times when the list is not up to date or inaccuracies. However even some of the manufacturer's specs in their manuals can be incomplete. Key thing to check here is what brands of discs compatibility can vary.

As a general rule, Verbatim are the best brand of discs from my experience of non-M-DISC discs. I've found non M-DISC discs e.g. ordinary DVD+R/-R CD-Rs to last over 10 years if looked after.

I think the 100Gb blu-ray M-DISCs are attractive for capacity but personally I'd go for the 50Gb blu-ray M-DISCs as these will be readable in any blu-ray drive, whereas 100Gb ones will require specific BD-XL specifications.

I would combine this with another backup means e.g. cloud or harddrive so that the strengths of each compliment each over and overlap the weaknesses of any one particular means.

USB drives

Use two USB drives to back up the master, local copy of the data. Keep one drive at a friend or family member's place. Swap them every so often.

USB hard drives are as cheap or cheaper than optical discs and 100% handier. And 100% more likely to have their contents transferred to more modern media as time passes - which is the only way the data will survive, long term.

You can use rsync or rdiff-backup to copy to the drives. The --compare-hash or --compare-full options to rdiff-backup may help guard against bit-rot. Though, if we're talking pictures, movies and the like, how bit-perfect does the backup need to be?

To put "long term" in perspective, get a credible doctor to say you have about a year to live.

The article should probably say how much data you want to save.

M Discs

I can vouch for the usability of M Discs, though not the life, of course.

I have been using them for at least two years. I have all my data on a NAS box, which I back up to another NAS box (They're cheap!) that is only powered on for the backup. I copy all the stuff I think is important to 100GB M Discs and store them in my safety deposit box. It takes a loooong time to write 100 GB, but I like having a copy of important data in a secure location, impervious to any internet failure.

M-disk marriage

II have been using them for over a year and have an external drive so I can lend it around to others who want to archive their data.

A couple of weddings have seen the couples get an m-disc of all the pictures I took -plus some video and music. I reckon that it makes more sense than any other method.

I also have an interest in ships and took many thousand shots last year. They may be of interest to enthusiasts in a hundred years so they will be going on m-disks.

Personally I think a physical disk has got a lot to be said for it in terms of durability. A fuure with EMP warfare may well sort out a lot of systems based on magnetic data storage. Not to mention accidental or natural EMP events.