Tom Sparks wrote:
The M-Disc
claims 1,000 year permanency.
http://www.mdisc.com/
Anyone have experience with these?
--Chuck
(wondering if we'll be able to find a 1,000 year old DVD player)
forget it there is no way you'll be able to play anything digital in a 1,000
years
because of Digital obsolescence[1] and add copyrights
the best example is the BBC Domesday Project[2]
[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_obsolescence
[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project
There is an assumption here which seems to have been missed.
One viewpoint is that the data will be kept without any attempt
to read the data during the 1000 years. Based on how storage
media changes every ten years, let alone 1000 years, it seems
almost self evident that drives able to read any data written more
than 100 years previously just will not exist.
If however the data files in question are checked and tested every
so often, the the following four concepts will likely apply.
(a) Survival of the media
(b) Survival of the drive
(c) Survival of operating system software which can read the file structure
(d) Survival of programs which can read the data structure of the file
In my experience, while (a) and (b) might survive, current operating
system software has not survived very long and should not be relied
upon to exist in the future. In practice, this will require every user
who wants to be able to read any given file that is archived to check
what is available often enough to be able to read old files. Naturally,
as a by-product of checking (c), this will also check (a) and (b) -
at which point, making a new copy of the file using current hardware
will probably be just as cost effective as maintaining old drives to
read the old data. Current storage costs are so low that it seems
very doubtful that the cost of storage for a new copy would outweigh
the cost of maintaining an old drive.
However, (d) seems even more of a problems as programs such
as editors abandon old formats without even retaining read only
capability within newer versions of the program. For users who
want to be able to read old files, it will probably be necessary to
make fresh copies every few years in order to handle older
data structures within a file.
For very long term storage sites, the same requirement applies.
I do agree that current DVD players are still able to read the
data from any original DVD media burned when they first
became available. Perhaps DVD's will be one of the very
few hardware media which will survive much longer than
usual. But more than even 100 years seems entirely unlikely.
Jerome Fine
Jerome Fine
