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Comment by _m8fo | Hacker News Reader

How is this any better than just burning your data to a blu-ray, which lasts centuries when stored under proper conditions (theoretically, anyway) I need to give this a closer look.

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This is such a classic hacker news comment

Always a good time for linking the Show HN for Dropbox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

The second comment is the important one, where they completely miss the point of ease of use. (The first comment is right, installing stuff on a corporate comptuer is tricky.)

So let's look at ease of use! You need to have a server and separately manage GPG keys. Looks like an archival blu-ray wins on that front. (And yes I see where it's a goal to make this easy to use for everyone, it's not there yet.)

So whether tabeth is wrong or right to think it's of limited use, they are not fundamentally missing the point.

Not having to worry if there will be any Blu-Ray readers available in a century.

Seriously. The only device I have which can read a CD-ROM is my car. The PS4 can read Blu-Ray and DVD but not CD-ROM.

If you really need to read a CD-ROM then getting your hands on a SATA DVD-Drive, which usually are able to read CD-ROM, shouldn't be that big of a problem. Without looking hard I'd probably come up with 3 spare ones in my basement alone.

Tho I don't think that many of the self-burned CD's from 2 decades ago are still any good, I know mine usually ain't.

Then I’d need to find a computer with a SATA interface... looking 10 years in the future it’d be even less easy.

I have friends who work in the IT section for an under-resourced cultural institute focused on the preservation and recording of disappearing cultures and ethnic groups, including the preservation of speech and utterances in languages that now have no living native speakers. They discovered recently, to their alarm, that the only surviving copies of some recordings were now on old 3½ and 5¼ inch floppies that had somehow been stored without accurate cataloguing. They are struggling to find equipment that can 1) read the discs, 2) interface with the disc drives, 3) tell them what is actually on each disc and what file formats are in use (they have good guesses, but no certainty) and 4) find software that will be compatible with those formats.

They have neither the skills nor budget to do in-house nor outsourced forensics for this. At this point they don't even know what exactly might be lost to humanity's knowledge, and the descendents of these people, forever.

Would something like

https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/490099/Bytecc-Interna...

work?

Yes, with a perfect floppy disk. There aren't any perfect floppy disks left. You need a kryoflux or similar.

Floppy + SD card reader -- looks handy. But still has an IDE connector. Recent motherboards only have SATA. The review here says you can't access the floppy via USB, fwiw: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1682019...

Maybe something like this: (USB floppy) https://www.amazon.com/External-Floppy-Portable-Windows-Requ...

Please! Put them in touch wih the Internet Archive. The equipment you're looking for is called the Kryoflux - https://www.kryoflux.com/

Hi, Jason Scott of the Internet Archive. Let's talk. jscott@archive.org.

So, I probably shouldn't have been surprised, considering it's HN, but the number of people who reached out to me on this was surprising and touching. I think I've responded to everyone directly, my apologies if I missed you.

I'm glad to report that, since last I'd spoken to them about the problem, they've figured out what to do and consider the matter solved. The material is recovered, recatalogued, and in good order.

Thanks again everyone for the concern, interest, and offers! I know where to come if something like this comes up again!

There are USB disc readers, USB floppy readers, USB to RS-232 cables, you name it. No need for SATA. They usually aren't very expensive either.

I store backups on BluRay and bought a USB BD drive for this reason. I’m not planning on keeping the backups in this format forever, if something better comes out in 10 or 20 years I’ll move to that. I only use the drive once or twice a year, so it should last that long, and there will still be adapters for USB type A then.

My biggest concern is getting the disks. I can walk into my local supermarket and buy a DVD-R or CD-R no issues, but BD-Rs (especially high capacity discs) are hard to find even now.

Out of curiosity, have you seen M-Disc?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC

It's supposed to provide a decent (not degrading over time) DVD and BluRay backup approach.

Years ago, with CD's I used to use Kodak "Gold" for archival things. M-Disc seems like the modern version.

I have a device that interfaces SATA (and a few other formats) to USB. A few of my friends have been very happy to borrow it, so it's definitely a tool I'm going to hang to. With no moving parts, it should last a while.

I have one as well, and it even does IDE too. I do computer repair in my spare time, so I'm not exactly the typical user, but I've gotten a lot more use out of mine then I would have expected as well.

For those looking to buy one, I would personally recommend just going for a simple one that has an external AC adapter. I've found a lot of the ones that attempt to power the drive straight from USB ports can unexpectedly have the drive power-off due to the USB ports not being able to supply enough power, which is obviously a huge issue (Even my eSATA with a Y-cable has this issue with some drives, making it basically unusable). Powering it externally is a lot more reliable.

> Tho I don't think that many of the self-burned CD's from 2 decades ago are still any good, I know mine usually ain't.

You'd be surprised. I went recently through several of mine and lo and behold they could all be read. I guess it depends a lot on your storage conditions.

I would actually be far more comfortable with storing my data for archival on CD-ROM or DVDs than BluRay, since the former standards have been publicly and freely documented[1][2] from the physical properties up to the logical bits and bytes, while I don't believe the same exists for the latter.

In other words, anyone can, with enough engineering resources, create a drive capable of reading those discs, which is more than can be said of more proprietary formats.

[1]http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecm...

[2]https://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ec...

>> Not having to worry if there will be any Blu-Ray readers available in a century.

Century? Startup sites like the one above last on average 6 months, that is, until they find out that their $6/mo DigitalOcean droplet suddenly costs... $10/mo! Or $100/mo or whatever and then they find out they cannot fund their $100/mo droplet and call it quits.

So... if you need the data to be around for 100 years, maybe not give it to the random startup.

This project started development 8 years ago.

https://github.com/camlistore/camlistore

It's an open-source project that has been around for nearly a decade, not some new startup.

In a century I don’t even think we’d have CD/Blue-Ray. By then most of us would be dead already, so why worry?

I’m sure a graph of Time vs Value for data would have a significant dip shortly after creation, but on the scale of centuries it only goes up. (just look at the Dead Sea Scrolls).

M-DISC is even better. Burnable discs use an organic dye which oxidizes over time. M-DISC uses a "glassy carbon" layer that is inert to oxidation.

They adhere to DVD-R, BD-R, and BD-XL standards so it's readable in standard disc drives. You need a special drive to burn them, however (requires a high-power laser).

> Burnable discs use an organic dye which oxidizes over time.

This is only true of DVDs and a rare variant of Blu-Ray called LTH. Even cheap shitty Blu-Rays from Chinese manufacturers use inorganic dyes these days.

Also, the French Archives did a test of a variety of DVDs for longevity in adverse conditions and found that M-DISC didn't last significantly longer than competitors, even those with inorganic dyes: https://documents.lne.fr/publications/guides-documents-techn...

The US DoD also did a similar test under different conditions and found it performed much better than the competition though: http://www.esystor.com/images/China_Lake_Full_Report.pdf

I suspect the difference between the French and US tests might be the French using a longer test duration and the Americans using light. The French went up to 1000h while the Americans only went to 24 as far as I can tell.

And unlike DVDs, I haven't seen any studies of longevity for M-DISC Blu-Rays.

It's different (better?) in that it doesn't rely on you remembering to actually burn that data, then store it safely. It comes with an app you can run on your phone to upload all your photos immediately, for instance. It has importers to archive all your tweets automatically, for example. It allows you to outsource the task of "Keep this blu-ray safe" to a cloud provider (or a friend) while encrypting your data to keep it private.

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