https://superuser.com/a/71239/37009
For example the M-DISC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC).
> Millenniata claims that properly stored M-DISC DVD recordings will last 1000 years.
I would then store those bits of media geographically and politically distributed. And I'd store it with paper documents describing the encoding, the file formats, the compression, any encryption, etc. I'd also include a few physical computers (eg. a raspberry pi or laptop) that has all necessary software to read, decode, and display the data. Set it up to be usable by a non-expert - in 1000 years time, there may be nobody who knows how to use a shell or open a file!
And I'd have a 2nd copy of the whole lot on hard drives connected to the internet for day to day serving of the data to people who need to see it. All the stuff above is only needed in case of organisational failure, war, civilisation collapse, etc.
If you do that, I would really love to read some more details on how you actually organize that.
The above is what I have set up for some organisations who want to keep data for thousands of years.
There are other bits to the process, like every 10-30 years, repeat the process with the new data and the old data. This time, the 'old' data will be much smaller compared to the storage mediums, so keep that data uncompressed, preferably unencrypted, and un-erasure coded in every geographic location. That removes many barriers to access the data, and increases the chances someone that finds it in 200 years bothers recovering the data.
Sadly in the future world there is a high chance some of the data is copyright, illegal knowledge or gdpr-impacted and all records need to be erased. There isn't really a good solution to that. It's almost impossible to protect against future humans wanting your data gone.
With the right tools you can read back the data and see how much degredation had occurred (even though all the data was readable). Using that info, you can have a good chance at extrapolating the time till the data becomes unreadable.
I wonder if Sony's ODA format could ever become more popular in the consumer market. I've never heard anybody mention it before.
Alternatively, I wonder if there could even be a "prosumer" robotic library system for common optical disks, something like a desktop archival data jukebox...
https://hackaday.com/tag/cd-changer/
http://hackalizer.com/jack-the-ripper-is-an-automated-diy-di...
http://hackedgadgets.com/2006/06/07/cd-changing-lego-robot/
Yes, you definitely want sth like that. And further extend it.
Are there any commercial products that use this technology?
Tape like LTO 6 is quite cheap these days and will last a long time when stored vertically in a dry, cool, dark place. Also at 2.5 TB net capacity per tape with barely used tape prices of 5-10 bucks one can easily write a couple more tapes just in case one is damaged. I think for leader pin damage there is a repair kit and if tape rips in two I remember there was a repair service by IBM which can fix even that and send you a fresh tape with the data or a repaired tape.
Still, aside from it being prohibitively expensive (LTO-8 seems like something of a floor given the size of Blu-Rays), tape backups seem to be a hard area to get into. I did some crappy little DLTs in the 1990s but nothing since, so "what software?" and the like questions are all new to me. And this would be with just a single drive, not even a library.
(I believe the final consensus pointed to arrays of HDDs where most of them are powered off, and the number of "live" drives per rack is bounded to allow high density/low cost, hence the need for access time/service level bounds, but the BD-XL idea is still intriguing!)
With the consumer discs, even considering cost per GB, the amount of effort required to handle a large library of low-capacity discs is just too great even if the cost is a little bit better. 128GB discs would have been very usable 5 years ago but again, those discs were never affordable to consumers, and the 25GB was still some effort at that time. Today even 128GB is not all that much, as data has grown. As far as I know there is nothing realistic on the horizon to replace blu-ray with higher capacity either, if movie content started being released in 8K it probably would be something like BD-XL with AV1 encoding (or maybe H265 again), not a fundamentally new iteration like DVD->BD.
The future for consumer storage seems to be SSDs and hard drives for fast and slow/bulk storage, and cloud for nearline storage. Tape is still relevant for enterprises though especially in automatic libraries.
The theory of hard drives being shut off/ powered on dynamically in a rack sounds intriguing. Sounds simple and yet difficult because of the rare usecase, i.e. no commodity hardware available. Maybe something to test out for colo backups to keep power usage down and prolong disk health.