The discs may survive, but will there be any equipment in 1000 or 10000 years that will be able to read it? Look at the problems they had with that digital domesday laserdisc from only a couple of decades ago.

mr_chips: utterly irrelevant. books are quite “susceptible” to fire and water damage don’t you think? the point is important digital information (e.g. the emails of Ian McEwan, Barack Obama etc.) can now be safely stored (in the British Library etc.) for posterity. Newsflash: small children aren’t allowed in the British Library archives.

I wonder what the price per disc of these will be? In my line of work I’m swamped by TBs of photos I have to back up. Hard disk storage is now at the pennies per gig level meaning I can duplicate or even triplicate my data, spread it around and leave it to chance that at least one copy will survive that asteroid headed for Earth, nuclear blast, whatever it is we’re planning to avoid here.

Of course if it’s something major like the Earth’s magnetic poles slipping then I probably wouldn’t have any working PC to use to recover the data.

@Tony Coleby what we’re planning to avoid is none of those, but simply the passage of time. why do people not get this? I thought PC Pro readers were supposed to be intelligent. you can back up your data 100 times, but if each of those back-ups has a life of 10 years, even 50 years, they will ALL fail around the same time. that is not posterity. this is posterity.

I don’t know about others, but the lifespan of my hard drives is not an issue. Probably every year, at least every 2 years, I buy x2 new hard drives of larger capacity. One is a primary drive and the other a backup drive stored at a top secret facility in my brother’s cupboard. At the moment I have x2 3TB drives and capacity wise they will probably last another year at the most. Effectively, as your data collection grows (especially media), surely so does the need to increase your hard drive capacity? Am I alone in this reasoning?

This thing could be the saviour of optical media.

@Mark Thompson EXACTLY! Not even “could be”, DEFINITELY IS!

These are good news in that they add to the existing arsenal of backup options, some of which suit some functions and some of which suit others.

@GW
Okay, so we get that you’re on commission for Milleniata. Calm down.

Yes, this media is fine for the low volume, low speed, indelible archival requirements of science and the arts. Undoubtedly great for that. But I wonder if business will take an interest – and if they don’t then it’s probably doomed to be an unsupported legacy device. And, as for consumers, 99% of us have absolutely nothing worth archiving for our descendants “3000 years in the future” anyway, so unless this reaches a similar price-point to standard dvds then it’s not going to gain much traction there either.

I hope I don’t have to explain to you how records on paper and stone are in a whole different league of universality to Word 2003 files (or, even worse for compatibility: Pages) saved on a dvd…

What “whole different league of universality” did hieroglyphics inhabit before the rosetta stone was discovered? how about unicode text?

You are seriously arguing £2 for a 5GB disc which lasts for 10,000 years is prohibitive?

“99% of us have absolutely nothing worth archiving for our descendants “3000 years in the future” anyway”

(a) archaeologists, anthropologists and social historians of the future take note.
(b) How about your marriage DVD, home videos and photos, emails with loved ones, essential docs like birth certificate, property titles, qualification certificates? favourite films and music? (subject to copyright, which is being reviewed re personal use) no?

why one person (GW) be allowed to be rude and obnoxious throughout the discussion thread and nobody allowed to answer back and defend themselves? sorry but i agreed like I did because I found his comments on the whole offensive. nothing i put in my first post was utterly irrelevant. i felt like i was being shouted down and belittled. so thanks for supporting his actions David in doing the above.

@mr_chips: I deleted several comments both from GW and from others that were crossing the line into personal attacks. I appreciate there are a few still there with some unhelpful comments, but I don’t want to overmoderate where at all possible.

Regards
David

As a fairly serious Amateur photographer (as in for the love of it, not for the money) and a former professional genealogical researcher (for the money not for the love!) I tend to try to archive everything I shoot – even the commonplace snapshots of people and scenes from as recently as the 50’s to 80’s are now helpful as 1) historical and 2) social records. With a reliable and robust storage medium it will be possible to easily and relatively cheaply store a lot of data. Bring it on!

Dose any one know if this technology could be used in hard drives as it seams a more commercial proposition than just 25gb disks, can they scale this up to say 2tb.

@MarkThompson
Do you think we’ll still be using DVD drives in 3000 years’ time (the time frame that GW indicates)? 5.25” disks were ubiquitous a while ago, and look at what happened to those in less than a dozen years. And that’s on top of a compatible OS to read the data at all, of course. I’ll be very, very disappointed in the human race if we haven’t moved on.

But we’ll only need a functioning pair of eyes and a brain to have a go at decoding that ol’ stone tablet scrawled with hieroglyphics.

@GW
A) Last time I checked, archaeologists, anthropologists and social historians made up that 1% of the population, so my argument still stands.
B) No, I doubt very much that my descendents will want to watch my endless wedding video or my thousands of samey honeymoon photos – nor would I want to subject them to this.

@Martin re optical drives and @Mark Thompson , I think an optical disc with a laser reading zeros and ones is a pretty good super-long term solution, particularly when in a 25GB blu-ray. Dangerous to predict how things will develop, but
(a) you could pretty much get your whole life on that (lots of long videos notwithstanding).
(b) Pretty easy to reverse engineer a disc in the very distant future. All you’d need is a microscope and a knowledge of binary code. binary code more universally decihperable than hieroglyphics no? no need for rosetta stone? interesting to consider anyway.

I remember when CD-Writers were new and cost £100+ and the discs were priced at £1-£2 and they only held ~650Mb, nowadays the drive to write them cost £12 and the discs themselves sell for ~£0.40 and this is over just 15-20 years, so we can be pretty certain that these drives and discs will become cheaper in the future, what will be intersting will be whether any company will offer cheap near line storage for home users

Quite a lot of my old DVDs and CDs are no longer readable in full, despite being kept in a dark cupboard. So this is good news for me in one sense — preserving personal memories etc. The capacity is simply too small for backups: even 50 GB pales in comparison to today’s 1 – 3 TB drives (I remember trying to back up onto a pile of 40 floppies once. Plus ça change!).

But…
1. A week’s family holiday just last week generated 9 GB of videos alone, and I probably won’t get time to edit this stuff until I retire, more than a decade away. Just the kind of memory one wants to preserve, buyt already more than the 4.7 GB currency capacity.
2. The M-disks target DVD drives, which are at the end of their life cycle. Look at floppies: I have hundreds knocking around but cannot buy a new drive if I wanted to.
3. What about USB sticks and SSD drives? Larger sizes are affordable now. What is their longevity like?

Reviews I’ve read say that the M-discs smell — like photographic chemicals one said. What’s outgassing? Usually it’s a plasticizer. So is it safe to sleep with one under your pillow? (-: