"You just skipped over all the solutions to the digital problems"
I am all ears, please tell me which solution I could recommend to my aging parents except "pay dropbox"?
I am all ears, please tell me which solution I could recommend to my aging parents except "pay dropbox"?
Trying to manage it yourself is work, as you’ve expressed. People who do that work for you ask for fees.
But you’ve seemingly decided that this benefit is not worth a fee so you don’t see it as a solution.
Maybe it's lack of experience, but I've never actually seen an M-Disc in the wild. I get the impression that you can't use a normal disk burner to write them, so expecting the world's Joe Schmoes to use them (much less maintain a RAID array) feels unrealistic. By contrast, just about everybody knows how to put photo prints in a physical album.
Just about everybody knows how to put photo files on a computer, too. The issue was how to protect against loss.
The world's Joe Schmoes won't store their physical photos in a fire-proof safe any more than they can maintain digital records.
Actually, they don't. My grandparents don't even own a computer, and my parents struggle to maintain digital collections of photographs (I can't count how many photo collections we've lost over the years due to failed hard drives, broken CDs, &c.)
I think the point about fire-proof safes is an excellent one, but we're also talking about different loss models: losing your possessions to a housefire is relatively uncommon while slowly losing your digital records to hardware failure, obsolete mediums, &c. is extremely common. Put another way: I suspect the number of people who have lose their wedding photos to hard drive failure far outsizes the number who lose the same photos to housefires.
Like you, I have never ever seen an M-disk, but back when I was 14 I burned numerous CD's with out family photos and most of them no longer work
Also people keep going on abiut a house fire, is it not going to destroy your disks too?
Some burners won't work with them, but there's a decent chance whichever one you happen to have will work.
> Expecting the world's Joe Schmoes to use them (much less maintain a RAID array) feels unrealistic.
This may be true, but I think we're talking about different things. I don't know that I care so much about what other people decide to do with their photos, it's their loss. I care about what I can do and what I'd recommend to friends/family/strangers who are concerned about this.