Sony And Panasonic Announce The 1TB Archival Disc

Hardocp ^ | Monday March 10, 2014 | Posted by Steve 8:13 AM (CST)

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Sony Corporation and Panasonic today announced that they have formulated "Archival Disc", a new standard for professional-use, next-generation optical discs, with the objective of expanding the market for long-term digital data storage. Optical discs have excellent properties to protect themselves against the environment, such as dust-resistance and water-resistance, and can also withstand changes in temperature and humidity when stored.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

I think the M- disc is the best for real long term storage.

See my updates.

Looks like a competitive market is occurring.

[dangerdoc]

I’m doing that using hard drives.

It would be really nice to have a simpler solution.

[Wuli]

while your statement about your computer’s hard drive is true, so too is one of the lead in comments:

“Optical discs have excellent properties to protect themselves against the environment, such as dust-resistance and water-resistance, and can also withstand changes in temperature and humidity when stored.”

between computer hard drives and optical disks, the term “excellent” in the statement above can be translated as “superior”, which is why digital archivists will be interested in the development

[rarestia]

Optical media is all but obsolete, IMO.

It's obsolete for short-term read/write, but it's superior in almost every way except for sealed spinning disk. For backups, writing critical data to optical disk and securing it in a fire safe or a temperature-controlled warehouse is about the best you can get for private, retrievable storage.

I've personally started writing encrypted backups to the Amazon cloud (Glacier), and it's insanely convenient; however, if they ever crack 2048-bit RSA encryption, my backups are as good as hacked. The BD-RWs I have in my fire safe, however, are not going anywhere and will survive the harshest fires.

Optical is definitely falling out of use, but it still has its place.

[Sherman Logan]

If you really want to keep them dry, I suggest a desiccant material be put in the baggie also. Mainly an issue if you lose electrical power.

Isn’t excessive dryness potentially damaging? Static electricity or some such?

[Aqua Buddhist]

USB has been around long enough that even if it gets replaced there will be readily available adapter units (plug one end into the new type of port, plug a USB cord into the other). At that point, it’ll be time to copy all important files onto the new standard media.

[zeugma]

I still have the very first CD I ever purchased. (DSOTM) Yes, it still plays. There is a big difference between music and data though, because CD players were designed to recover gracefully from errors. If you miss a few bits of a song, you won't notice while listening, but if you drop bits from your files, the result can be quickly catastrophic. I must say though, that I'm extremely happy with how long my music CDs have lasted. cdparanoia can actually report how successful it is in ripping the data off a CD.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

Estimated time remaining: 209 hours, 37 minutes

Aye...therein lies the rub.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

And I used to think I was the cat’s meow when I installed my 120Mb 3.5” Super Disk drive...10 years ago.

[Daffynition]