https://www.verbatim.com.au/products/m-disc-bdxl-100gb/
100 GB, and a lifespan of hundreds of years, it’s hard to top that.
Mine usually have the life span of 1 toddler encounter
500gb for ~100 US dollars is not bad* (just saw it is AU). I don’t think I’d ever need something quite so long lasting and will we even watch or interact with media the same way in like 40 years? Movies and screens may get phased out for holo or something no ones even dreamed of yet.
If the burner is cheap enough, or you can borrow one, backing up family photos in a way that will be viewable in hundreds of years time would be worth it to me.
I would not even be confident that the disc would be readable in 50 years’ time except by certain archivists or hobbyists.
There are so many hours of music people wrote on Amigas or Atari STs that are just floating around out there on floppy discs that are still readable, but only by a very small number of people, so they will never be heard again, and it’s been only 30 years.
Another example- right now I have family movies my parents took back in the 60s on Super-8 films. Super-8 isn’t exactly impossible to play, but why would I get a Super-8 projector and a screen just to watch those even though they’re watchable? That would be both cost- and space-prohibitive. Thankfully, I had them digitized a long time ago.
This is why you add a disc reader and a laptop, that can run directly from a power brick without a battery installed, in the safe. This way the next generations have a way to read it and transfer it to modern media.
I have like 3 pictures I actually care about anymore I’d be more than willing to delete the rest. My parents have always taken like at least a dozen pictures every time we “do something” and I always have to ask… Why drop everything you are doing for a picture that you will, in all likelihood, never look at again. I’d much rather just enjoy the moment tbh
Because in 20 years your memory will be lost. But you’ll run across the photo and it will be incredible. It will both remind you and fill in the gaps that your memory lost.
I have all the best photos of my kids printed every year into a photo album. I don’t trust digital despite having 3 copies. My 100 year azzo verbatim DVDs kept in black cases in the basement went bad after 10 years. Mdisc on paper should actually last 100 unlike azzo but I don’t trust it either.
What exactly happened to the DVDs in the basement? That’s really interesting, indeed DVDs also claimed 100+ years of life span, but as you can see that’s only the theoretical maximal in perfect conditions, which don’t exist in real life, and the same thing happened to your DVDs can happen to Blu-Ray disks too
Burned DVDs use a dye that turns dark when hit with a laser. The dye was claimed to be stable for 100 years but wasn’t. Mdisc is different and should last longer.
That might be the case, but I haven’t cared about taking photos for over 25 years, not sure having kids or losing all my memories would change any of that.
You should value yourself more. If you think it’s important to have history passed down more than 20 years or whatever the average person remembers, then your own life should be as valuable to you.
I can pass down stories much more valuable than a series of photos my kids will throw in the bin. My grandmother had huge photo albums, now she’s gone and we just stuff them into the back of a closet.
lol I don’t think you’re the target demographic if you can’t imagine any scenario of this having a good purpose to exist. It’s apparently rated by the Department of Defense, definitely has some applications people are interested in. Hell, you could recoup costs on harddrive failures alone over your child’s lifetime, just need a reader. Would be a pretty neat present to give someone as well filled like a photo album with personal media/ favorite games/ music/ whatever you want backed up for your kids. People spend a lot of money on multiple backup options so this is just another ace in your deck along with other safeguards.
True, I’m no data hoarder. Just seems like it’s a very small niche that this fits into. Never had a hard drive fail on me, but I’ll give it a couple more decades lol
Not without a disk drive that runs scrambled data decoding (BD+) in a VM on top of decryption (AACS), according to the (reverse engineered) DRM spec of bluray.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Blu-ray
Sorry, but, if nothing else, the DRM makes Bluray and DVD as long-term archive unsuitable.
If you’re encrypting and scrambling your own personal data and not properly saving the keys, that L is on you dog.
Not sure where you’re from, but that website link is Australian and $150 AUD is about $94 USD at the moment.
Ahh, didn’t see the .au
Verbatim is doing more than just keeping the formats on life support – it also unveiled new hardware at CES 2025. Its Slimline Blu-ray Writer lets you back up 4K video to Ultra HD Blu-ray and even comes bundled with antiquated Nero disc burning software.
This is the important part imo, given that LG and Sony both pulled out of the USB Blu-ray reader-writer market
https://www.verbatim-europe.com/en/blu-ray-writers/products/external-slimline-blu-ray-writer-43890
Means we’ll be able to rip Blu-ray’s into the future. At least, that’s what I hope. Need to check there are cracks for these writers.
EDIT: Won’t link to it here, but many Verbatim writers, UHD and otherwise, use Pioneer hardware internally and are therefore crackable.
I have a stack of Verbatim blanks I bought years ago just in case they ever stopped being sold; I’ve actually used quite a few to create daisy disks and audio CDs.
Who is going to keep making Minidiscs though?
I still burn discs every now and then. Definitely glad to see I don’t have to panic buy stockpiles of them now.
Unfortunately I don’t think Verbatim manufactures any quad-layer discs, so Sony was the only real option for 128GB disks.
Furthermore, M-Disc is still very pricey per-GB, and their non M-Disc BD disks aren’t priced that much better. I’ve also recently got a spindle of Verbatim BDXLs that every single one would fail to either write or read at the layer transitions, so having a single option here is already proving to be painful.
Disc failure is the verbatim I remember, but I’m glad they’re still around. My 2008 car has a 6 disc CD changer, and I have a few retro PCs which rely on CDs too. Yes, I know I can get adapters for CF cards and the like, but doing things the old way is the whole point.
Can someone tell me, why weren’t optical discs (mechanically, ergonomically) designed similarly to floppies? In a protective envelope with a window.
Sony PSP discs had something like that. More expensive and impractical from looks, the window part was always open and cleaning it from dirt is inconvenient if untouched for long. But then the cover for that window wouldn’t break off, and the looks solve the problem of “looking obsolete” that arises with clueless baboon crowds. Sony engineering back then somehow evokes feelings in me.
CD-ROM discs came in caddies early on. They weren’t popular with consumers I would guess. MiniDiscs were designed with a protective caddie.
Price. Once the industry retooled the production lines, CDs became dirt cheap to reproduce, and successive generations of optical media are only somewhat more expensive. Plastic shells and mechanisms cost money. CDs are probably the cheapest physical audio format ever (at least as far as production costs are concerned).
I did get a ~128 micro sdxc (micro center branded) for free, so, im kinda on the fence, but wont mind rocking a cd player again!
Work to preserve physical media across all your entertainment. You give away your leverage as a consumer with every stream and digital “purchase” (because of course you legally own nothing digital from these companies, you lease the right to access them, until that company decides you no longer get that access, see Sony)
Verbatim for the win
This is good news. I burn my some of my medias to DVD and Blu-ray discs.
