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.