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RIP obsolete tech
(sopuli.xyz)
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this post was submitted on 11 May 2025
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I burn Blu-rays once in a while. They work for backup.
They don't last very long. About 5-10 years at most, and that's if you bought special archival burnable DVDs. If you depend on them for backups, you should check the integrity annually (always include a checksum like SHA256 with any backup archive).
I have CDs that I burned in the 90s that still work fine. I’m assuming the blu-rays I burn now will probably last as long, which is decades longer than I need them to.
Music CDs or data? Music CDs have built-in error correction, data CDs don't. You can certainly extend the lifetime if they're stored in the dark in a cool, dry place (UV light, heat, and humidity all damage the dye that gets burned to encode them) but they're not reliable archival storage without error correction.
Data CDs actually use even more robust error correction since they use interleaving in addition to FEC since they don't need to scan in "real time"
Music. I have some data CDs I burned in the mid 2000s, that I booted up a few years ago (Linux live CDs). I don’t have any data CDs from the 90s though. IIRC, ISO 9660 does have error correction.
Edit: I just looked it up. ISO 9660 doesn’t have error correction, but the underlying system, CD-ROM Mode 1, does have error correction.
I heard that the higher the data density on DVD and BR means the higher the failure rate. Though i have no real evidence of that myself.
Maybe one or two bits corrupted here or there will only cause some unnoticeable artefacts anyway.
...you need so much specific equipment. You do realise that the day blue ray was announced we collectively gave up on physical data storage in the form of polished mineral disks right?
So much equipment.
First you have to buy the DVD writer and then you also have to get yourself blank DVDs.
We definitely did not gave up on discs. They may no longer be mass consumer oriented. But bluray for backup, archiving and data transfer are still a thing. Nothing beats the bandwidth of a plane filled with hard drives. The media itself is not relevant, magnetic tape is still available and used to this day. The first time I held more than a terabyte in my hand was in a data tape cartridge. Consumer hard drives hadn't gotten there yet. Even today, new optical media is being researched. There are fascinating breakthroughs on laser engraved crystal storage.
Anyways, I just wanted to remember that wasteful mass consumption media is not representative of humanity as a whole.
Aren't SD cards higher data capacity than HDDs at this point? Sure maybe not per unit or cost but for the volume of space I am pretty sure HDDs lost a while ago.
High capacity SD have a miserably failure rate with regular use. In PI's and dashcams many only get a couple of years before they start having errors. USB thumb drives do better but they have heat problems. neither are great for backups unless you just do a lot of write once and store
Could just have more than 1 backup though, then it doesn't really matter much if the storage is less reliable as its very unlikely for multiple to fail at the same time
Today? Of course. But until recently that wasn't the case. Longevity though.
We got prediction of sector failure rates on HDDs and magnetic tapes down to a science. Makes archiving really easy as you know with statistical significance how often to test, copy and move data, to preserve it virtually forever (as long as there is someone maintaining the archive).
Solid state memory can be extraordinarily dense, but the denser it gets, the more it's prone to corruption and failure. Worse still, when solid state fails, the whole storage unit becomes obsolete, and data gets nightmarishly hard to extract, maybe even gone forever. Only with very rare and specialized workshops that have the equipment to do it. On the other hand, I've seen technicians recover data from tapes that were literally in a fire, right there on the field with bog standard equipment.
When you factor in that the average cost of a terabyte of magnetic storage is less than half of the average cost of a terabyte of solid state, then a few cubic centimeters of space per unit become practically irrelevant. Corporate settings actually prefer more smaller storage units than larger, as they cause less trouble when they fail. Redundancy is a numbers game.
I just use a USB Blu-ray burner. Similar to this one:
https://a.co/d/0KIB1LJ
Polished mineral? Like a silicon wafer? um??
I use them all the time. If you plan to leave any data behind that even theoretically exists in 50 years, readable or not, optical media is your only option. Or Ardrive if you want to spend 1000x the amount and make it public. Or microfilm if you are a masochist. In case you plan on leaving any videos around for your grandchildren.
NOOOOO! You must use cheap AliExpress SSDs, because something something 1980's tech something something technological advancements must be pushed at all cost!
Tape or bust (if you can afford it)
Was looking for a cheap tape drive, couldn't find any.
DIY Tape Drive:
eBay and the 1980s may be helpful
I've never had a Blu-ray player and at this point I expect I never will.