Most writable disks have a poor life. the only good long term backup option is lots of redundancy and regular check that they are all readable - recreating what isn’t before you lose it
Honestly I just go for redundant drives and 3-2-1 backups, I remember looking at those pioneer bluray discs when they were announced and quickly deciding it wasn’t worth the cost.
Your steel plate backup system sounds intriguing though - maybe it can be used as wallpaper? “What’s that on your walls?” “My wedding photos”
The great part of that idea is that no one will think you’re crazy when they see painstakingly carved rows of binary covering every surface of your home.
As someone else mentioned, CDs, DVDs, and especially BDs are supposed to last quite a while. I’d obviously burn more than one though and check them occasionally (and probably throw most of it on encrypted cloud storage in case there’s a fire or something).
Most writable disks have a poor life. the only good long term backup option is lots of redundancy and regular check that they are all readable - recreating what isn’t before you lose it
Yeah, gotta use ISO/IEC 18630 certified discs and burner to ensure longevity.
That’s a good start, but the most effective backup is manually carving the binary contents of a file onto steel plates that are many miles long.
Steel decays pretty quickly. The most durably data storage medium we’ve figured out is still ceramics
Metal can not be changed by Ruin
Maybe wrong community for this
Well there we go.
Honestly I just go for redundant drives and 3-2-1 backups, I remember looking at those pioneer bluray discs when they were announced and quickly deciding it wasn’t worth the cost.
Your steel plate backup system sounds intriguing though - maybe it can be used as wallpaper? “What’s that on your walls?” “My wedding photos”
The great part of that idea is that no one will think you’re crazy when they see painstakingly carved rows of binary covering every surface of your home.
Will they know it’s binary? Surely the dots would be so small it looks like noise unless there’s an emerging pattern from file headers etc
As someone else mentioned, CDs, DVDs, and especially BDs are supposed to last quite a while. I’d obviously burn more than one though and check them occasionally (and probably throw most of it on encrypted cloud storage in case there’s a fire or something).
I recently found some cheap CDs and DVDs that I backed my stuff up on 17 years ago and the data was pristine 👌
CDs are rated for 10–30 years, Blurays for 50–80. YMMV with cheap low quality disks, of course.