Hi, i wrote: > > > where they [ASUS] expect us to still find M-Disc DVD+R media.
Michael Lange wrote: > > 10 4.7 GB discs at 85.11 € + 7.31 € for shipping from Japan :-) > > Australia, 5 discs for "~" 21.74 € + ~ 42.97 shipping Wonders of globalization. > > the "killer" bargain: 10 Verbatims for ~ 46.11 € + free shipping! Wow. That's only 20 times the price of regular DVD-R or DVD+R media. (I see slightly cheaper offers for M-Disc BD-R 25 GB. Still 4 EUR per piece while normal BD-R cost about 50 cents.) Stefan Monnier wrote: > I wonder if "archival quality" really serves its purpose here. I mean, > I understand that flash is not reliable in the long term, but there's > also the problem of making sure you'll still have a working DVD reader > in the future. There are some reasons for hope: The specifications of media and drive behavior are publicly available. Lots of DVD and BD readers already exist. When rarely used they have a long life span. (I recently bought a Lindy USB box for a SATA drive. To my surprise it came with a SATA-IDE adapter. So i could use it for my old CD burner of 2003.) The separation of storage medium and storage device keeps the archive safer against electronics failure. Whether M-Disc is more reliable than organic dye discs has still to be proven. 1000 years is a courageous goal. At least i'd demand glass discs rather than polycarbonate. > I thought the only reliable way to archive digital data would be to > treat preservation as a *process*, where you "refresh" your archive > every N years by copying it over to a newer media (with enough > redundancy to detect and correct errors that may have crept in during > those N years). Indeed. It is important that archives get check-read regularly and that there is more than one identical copy of each medium. Optical media contain lots of error correction data. I add my own MD5s on the filesystem level. (I have a BD-RE which one drive regards as fully readable while all others and my MD5s say that a few blocks are damaged.) The most important verification run is directly after burning. During the last 20 years i never encountered a medium which later went bad without showing visible signs of physical damage. Have a nice day :) Thomas
