[deleted post] A reason not to care about the Reddit M-Disc "controversy" (an opinion)

https://www.reddit.com/r/datacurator/comments/19fa26q/a_reason_not_to_care_about_the_reddit_mdisc/
A reason not to care about the Reddit M-Disc "controversy" (an opinion)

An opinion for the fellow optical nerds:

A lot of folks on Reddit are skeptical about the M-Disc. I think this topic has been debated pretty exhaustively. There are two camps: believers (I'm here) and disbelievers (plenty of others).

People using optical for archival are really concerned about data permanence. So it's understandable that the debate is somewhat 'heated' at times - even if from the outside it must seem utterly ridiculous.

I'd like to try to offer a fresh perspective.

The Blu Ray LTH -> HTL shift

Blu Rays were originally made using LTH (low to high) technology. This consisted of an inorganic layer which is widely agreed to offer better longevity than any of the organic dyes, including AZO.

Unfortunately the industry cheaped out and decided that Blu Ray shouldn't be manufactured any better than its predecessors (CDs and DVDs). We shifted over to organic dies with inferior longevity. Like many I think that this was a major retrograde move. My personal view: I'd trust archival CDs and DVDs over these products (rationale: at least you've got the gold as a buffer).

The old LTH discs used a technology called MABL - metal ablative recording layer. I've seen it widely estimated that this should yield a disc longevity of something in the region of 100 years.

The M-Disc skeptics' claim

The M-Disc writes data to an inorganic layer. Its patent is freely accessible on Google Patents. Many people are convinced however that the composition of this inorganic layer is no different than LTH.

I have a quick retort to this: if Verbatim already had the tech, why buy it from Millenniata (the startup which developed the M-Disc technology before going bankrupt)?

But anyway, here's a different perspective that maybe offers food for thought.

Does data permanence beyond a century actually matter!?

I would contend that 100 years' archival life is good enough for anybody and that projections of longevity beyond that point in time are kind of moot. I say this because 100 years is more than the average human lifespan in any country at the present time.

My mission for data preservation in this: I want to keep the stuff free from bitrot until the successor technology comes to market. This could be holographic tech. This could be something entirely different than anything we've had before that's currently only in early stage R&D. Either way, I don't see the M-Disc as my indefinite storage medium. It's just a cool tech that can keep my data safe - on something like digital ice- until, like old VHS tapes, it gets moved onto something better.

Viewed from this perspective, I actually don't really care whether I'm getting "real" M-Disc (even though I believe I am!) or old LTH stock that Verbatim has sneekily tried to pass off as something different. The 25GB M-Discs are about $1 a disc. If the old LTH ones were $1 a disc .. at my two discs per month of disk generation ... I'm not too put out about being shafted the price of a cup of coffee.

If I were really worried (I'm not), I'd create ECC and parity data to be ready to repair any potential corruption. There are probably other options too.

Once my stuff is reasonable safe for 100 years - hell, I'll settle for 50 - it's "good enough" for me and a lot better than storing it on HDD or LTO which could begin to go bad in as little as a few years or as long as 30. But probably not much longer than that.