The 1,000 year DVD is here

[Isaac]

"I didn't believe it it would ever work, but now I do."

[digitaldog]

Carl Sagan: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
The part that is difficult to accept:

But now that I've given a closer look and a respected manufacturer of optical media and started shipping the product, I am a believer.

[jrsforums]

Carl Sagan: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
The part that is difficult to accept:

Good quote....

[Isaac]

The part that is difficult to accept

The part that I find difficult to accept is that there will be a device capable of accessing data from those DVDs.

[Ellis Vener]

I don't know what will happen in the next thousand years, but I've been using the M-Disc media for a few years with fine results and my clients report no problems with reading them in their PCs and Mac drives.

[langier]

Now all that's needed is a 1000 year-compatible DVD player, 1000 year Photoshop, 1000 year computer...

[michael]

The human race surviving for 1,000 would be nice as well.

Michael

[Ellis Vener]

The human race surviving for 1,000 would be nice as well.

Michael

Agreed.

[Isaac]

I don't know what will happen in the next thousand years, but I've been using the M-Disc media for a few years with fine results and my clients report no problems with reading them in their PCs and Mac drives.

Thanks, I recently saw them in a store but without the special drives needed to write the discs.

At-least there might be a decent chance of M-Disc being readable in 20 years :-)

[TwistedShadow]

Well, no time like the present. I'll be selling DVDs capable of lasting 10,000 years.

Trust me, I'll have spent all the money, died of natural causes before you ever figure out I sold your relabeled common DVDs 

[tom b]

My older Macs, as sold, couldn't read a floppy disc. My new Mac, as sold, can't read a DVD. The local video stores have all gone out of business.

The times they are a changing…

Cheers,

[michael]

DVDs?

Ya, I remember them. May even have a few in a box somewhere along with my 5 1/4" floppies and ZIP drives.

Michael

[Isaac]

So what are you using for archive?

[Clearair]

Hi
Been off photography and especially the computer side for a while after Aperture & Apple files lost.
Posted some time ago as disaster.
One thing that came out of the teeth gnashing was my rose tinted longing for the old days.
Not really just kidding, have you looked at your old 35mm trannies recently? What is the chemical smell? etc adnauseam.
BUT that box under the bed full of processed films was reliable. A spinning disk in a vacuum or ssd with a finite read write time IS NOT.
Just my opinion. So I had a knee jerk reaction called Blue Ray. Michael commented at the time that this was not archival and I agreed.
But what is archival? A day,a month, a year or 1000 years.
This is what I did and continue to do.

Buy branded 25GIG only single layer discs that have some claim for longevity. Look for supplies and pricing especially here in the UK.
Handle like you would that Hanemhule print. Use standard full size jewel cases that do leave a half mm gap between disc and case top and bottom.
Store upright, in my case Lietz cardboard archival boxes in a Peli hard case before putting under the bed!!haha

I bought an external blue Ray burner by LG almost a year ago specifically as I had read about M DISC. These burners were not available in the UK retail outlets so I contacted an Amazon trader who was very helpfull and imported shedloads from Germany. Apple never supported Blue Ray and all the apps for using BR were err rubbish, but the OS burned these discs just like DVDs. Only the eject was more reliable using the finder rather than trash.
It is a usb3 device and I am using a 2008 MacPro desktop with a usb3 added device. I love a computer that you can add to.
Well it does not like the LG so I record using as a usb2. Takes around 40min a disc.
I use a check sum app, Image Verifier and it does weed out duff files. Use before burning and after.

The only failure was when trying the usb3, after that all discs were a success. I date them as I go on and will test them against the check sum data base every 6 months until I get bored. I am confident that they will be readable in 10 years or I will jump off the edge. I hope for 20 years. Much better than the electronic storage which of course we all use for speed and usability.

This is a disaster recovery solution for me. Not a working data base. The LG and the MacPro will not be scrapped or sold but maintained with cloned software backups and be purely an archival solution, woken up every now and then. Not updated to the latest super iphone OS, clouds on the horizon anyone?

Aperture is no longer developed by Apple and works better than ever.

[TwistedShadow]

So what are you using for archive?

I use 3 external hard drives.

G-Raid 6TB (3 TB with the second 3TB drive setup as backup) and a portable 2TB WD external drive. The portable unit is updated and comes home with me daily...incase the the gallery goes down in flames or washed away in a flood. Study has shown 80% of external hard drives will last 4 years. So I replace all my drives every 3 years...which has a 1.4% annual failure rate compared to 4 years which is 11.8%. I thought about DVDs but as mentioned above, technology marches on. How many computers sold today will back up using tapes or floppy disc?

[michael]

So what are you using for archive?

When traveling I use my Macbook Pro's SSD drive, backed up daily to a 1TB SSD via USB3. I also don't erase my cards until I'm home, so in fact I always have three copies. One in my briefcase (the Macbook), one on my camera bag (the cards) and one in my suitcase (the SSD drive).

At home I currently use a 3TB Promise RAID as my working drive and make regular backups of important new image files to a seperate 2TB portable drive. I then bring monthly updates to an off-site location.

It all simply becomes routine after a while.

For long term archival purposes I migrate my Lightroom Master Library to a new drive every couple of years as the technology changes.

For the most archival storage I have prints made with pigment inks on paper without OBAs, storted in metal boxes. These are likely good for 100-200 years.

After that, no one will care, least of all me.

Michael

[Lightsmith]

There is a reason why the Library of Congress has stayed with archiving prints and negatives. No electronic device with removable media has had the devices supported for more than a decade. Think of the 120K 8 inch floppy followed by the 160K 8 inch floppy followed by the 1.44MB floppy followed by the DAT tape drives with more than 6 different formats, followed by the CD, CD-ROM, DVD, flash media.

The safest storage device for archival data at this time is a hard drive stored in a bank vault. Even then you need to store all flies as TIFF format for universal readability by future applications. It is the only public open standard for data and images. 

[Jeremy Roussak]

The safest storage device for archival data at this time is a hard drive stored in a bank vault. Even then you need to store all flies as TIFF format for universal readability by future applications. It is the only public open standard for data and images.

At this time, perhaps. But what interface? SCSI? SATA? eSATA? USB2? USB3? FireWire? (400? 800?) Thunderbolt?

The simple fact is that no storage which requires some kind of technology to read is future-proofed. You just have to keep up to date with developments and copy files onto new devices before those you are using become so obsolete as to be unreadable. For 1,000-year survival, you'd better have tech-savvy, competent descendants, too.

Jeremy

[Clearair]

A hard drive in a vault will be good for how long as they need to be refreshed or used to stay uncorrupted and in working condition.
I think we are talking a year or so but I am no expert.
Other solutions do not have this limitation.
SSD may not have this issue but again I don't know.
44 Blue rays and counting.

[hjulenissen]

At this time, perhaps. But what interface? SCSI? SATA? eSATA? USB2? USB3? FireWire? (400? 800?) Thunderbolt?

The simple fact is that no storage which requires some kind of technology to read is future-proofed. You just have to keep up to date with developments and copy files onto new devices before those you are using become so obsolete as to be unreadable. For 1,000-year survival, you'd better have tech-savvy, competent descendants, too.

Jeremy

In all fairness, being able to read Egyptian hieroglyphs seems to rely upon a single stroke of luck: finding the rosetta stone. If you want to set your mark on history you should probably build really large stone work (i.e. the pyramids) or start a (successful) religion. Photography is probably not the right thing t do.

I did read that local authorities kept backups of their magnetic tape economic transactions from the 1970s. They also kept backups of the tape readers in order to read them. They did not keep backups of the computers and software needed to interpret the data though. Good luck for a historian trying to reconstruct arcane databases from raw byte streams...

-h