M-DISC as an archival storage medium

The M-DISC has been found by the United States Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division to withstand accelerated aging testing with no data degradation. No other optical disc has demonstrated such a capability. Why hasn't the digital preservation industry adopted the M-DISC as a recommended storage medium?

user173

• storage
• archival
• medium
• data
• degradation

Comments

• Paul Wheatley: This question looks like spam to support a particular product.
• mopennock: From the FAQ - 'You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face.' What's the problem that you face here?

Answer by Donald.McLean

I can only speak as to why I don't/would not use M-Disc for my own personal archiving.

My backup consists of virtually all of the digital media that my family consumes:

1. digital video of movies, TV shows and home movies

2. digital music

3. digital images (from a digital camera, or digitized prints)

4. ebooks

5. other files created by us in various formats

The total size of this content is approximately 1.5 TB, which would require more than 300 M-Discs, just for one copy. I don't see my storage needs doing anything but getting larger in the future.

With a per-disc cost of nearly \$3.00, it would cost me around \$1,000 to make a single backup of my data. There's no possible way that I could justify that kind of expenditure, or the time involved to create and maintain an archive using such a medium.

Comments

• John Lovejoy: Not to mention the time taken to make that copy onto M-Discs - swapping 300 discs is going to take a while. As @donald-mclean mentioned, this strategy would cost around \$1,000. You can buy a lot of 3 Terabyte drives for that cost.
• Andy Jackson: And then there's the charming notion that in, a thousand years, there'll be plenty of DVD drives knocking about in order to access these tiny amounts if data.