this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2025
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Modern Blurays should actually last longer than DVDs. Bluray M-Discs supposedly even last 1000 years. 100 years for DVDs is pretty optimistic. 20-50 years is more realistic.
Apparently there's some huge drama in data hoarding communities about manufacturers switching between different recording technologies, and how everybody is worried that they aren't going to last for 5-10-100-1000 years.
I have 3 physical backups of all my stuff, one a rotating offsite backup. The backup media gets replaced over time.
I don’t expect media (especially backup media) to last more than 10 years. But it doesn’t matter, as my NVMe backup solution of today looks nothing like my spinning rust backup solution of 20 years ago, despite holding all of that data.
invest in a tape backup, tape formats like LTO will last LTO tapes are cheap and durable. Write time can be slow but reading is quick enough for what it is
sure an EMP might corrupt it but if you are that paranoid, you could use a safe for shielding
I’ve always been curious about this stuff and I know I need to make some effort soon, ever since we moved our home recordings from VHS to DVD some 15-20 years ago.
My understanding is that SSDs are also likely to lose data when unpowered for a long time, which is why they haven’t been recommended to me for external backup drives.
“Spinning rust” is much cheaper than I thought, even if I have to pay 200$ in shipping to get a bunch of massive used server drives here. And it seems to not have that problem, with the downside of either needing to be completely powered off or wasting a bit of power when it’s not active. I’m still not sure where the HDD parking technology is at.
Of course ripping all the physical media would also be nice. A lot of the original discs I have (most of my discs are straight shitty copies with one file, yay third world) have things like special features and multiple audio tracks, things like that. I wonder how those should be organized.
The main point is that with a regular backup regime, it doesn’t matter if SSD will lose your data if unpowered for a long time… because a) they won’t be unpowered for a long time (there’s rotation happening here, not archival), and b) you’ll have already hopefully moved off any specific piece of media before MTBF, and if you haven’t, hopefully all your devices don’t fail at exactly the same time.
So yeah: SSD isn’t for archival purposes. But archival isn’t really what we’re after here, as backup of ALL data is a possibility. It’s not like we have a monk or vellum shortage to worry about.