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Firm offers 1,000 year discs that use a special optical drive
DATA ARCHIVING OUTFIT Milleniata has started to take pre-orders for its "1,000 year" optical discs.
Milleniata claims that its proprietary media can withstand severe shock and temperature differences and is a "new line of Optical Disc technology to last the next 1000 years". In order to have this almost ever-lasting media all you have to do is buy a special optical drive that currently will only be produced by LG and hope that in 1,000 years time the drive will still be available.
While Milleniata's claims regarding the physical capabilities of its media might well be true, there is far more to data archiving than the media itself. The fact that Milleniata's discs need a special drive is an obvious problem, but beyond that there is the matter of the interpretation of data once formats are long gone.
For instance, a century from now there will be no guarantee that Microsoft will be using the Word Document format, or even exist as a company, so what happens to the Word Document format? The issue of archiving data for reading in future centuries is a non-trivial research area and it includes not just the metadata required to 're-create' the data but also a universal computer to access it.
The universal computer is in effect a virtual machine that is based on widely agreed standards. The goal is to have a virtual machine that can access data that is being generated today, years from now. Where Milleniata's product falls down is that once the proprietary drives become obsolete there will be a chance that data stored on those discs will be lost forever because nothing will be able to access it.
The problem is highlighted by the BBC's Doomsday project, a digital time capsule that was stored on Laserdisc. Even a few decades after it was created, Laserdisc players are almost impossible to find and the BBC has taken the sensible step of putting the content of the Doomsday discs online as a means to archive the data.
So while Millenniata might improve on the durability of DVDs, to believe that it is the way to store data for 1,000 years is simply naive and will, most likely, end with disappointment for future generations. µ
Tags: Hardware
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If you research further, this disc will be written by any LG drive, soon to be licensed to all drive manufacturers, not a proprietary drive. Also, we have been reading discs for 30 years, and we are still listening to lp's. We would be unwise to think we will not be using optical in the next 30-50 years. As these discs will last that long, it is 5-10 times longer than any digital storage we have today.
I do think it's pretty outrageous that there are no solutions for private citizens to store data reliable past 3 years or so, in freaking 2011, so I certainly think it's a good thing to develop that finally.
It does have to be able to store a decent amount though, we use more and more data and it requires more and more room to make a backup.
...but didn't claim they could retrieve it after 1000 years.
It's like when an outsourcer claims they do backups as contracted.
However the contract neglected to require them to be able to do a restore.
Oh yeah...it was with the introduction of the writable Compact Disc way back in the early '90s. Yeah, they all last forever until they didn't. Coasters, anyone?
Laser Discs are probably a good choice for storing data long term, or at least they are conceptually. If you make them correctly and evacuate the oxygen from the glue, I don't see why they couldn't last for a very, very long time. On top of that, however, they're analog. There's no DRM, no sophisticated computer needed to read them, no codec, no bits, bytes, programming, etc-- so the analogy falls a little short. Plus, they're really easy to find.
did i put that drive?
Supposedly the disks can be read on any DVD drive, but it takes a proprietary drive to write data to the disc.
That's what they said about my Code written on clay tablets. Now who's laughing?