
Rescuing Our Audio History from Melting - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/blog/how-chemistry-is-rescuing-our-audio-history-from-melting
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michaelgrafl
Bummer. I've always considered magnetic tape to be indestructable, for all
practical purposes. But more and more I'm starting to consider M-Discs as my
archival storage media of choice.

Does anyone here use them for archiving their photos/music/video data? I am
less afraid of death itself than of being forgotten afterwards. I need
something I can trust my legacy with.

~~~
hga
What really concerns me about M-Discs is the multiple reports on Amazon.com
that they don't have a handle on quality control. If one or more discs bought
in a single pack fail right off the bat, how are we to believe that the ones
that are written successfully really are going to last for a long time?

If your really important data, the stuff that you don't want forgotten
afterwards, is relatively small (vs. mass market media where there's always
more copies out there), I'd go with high quality CD-Rs in environmentally well
controlled locations, unless MAM-A Gold DVD recordable media turned out to be
a lot more reliable than we expected. Don't know about BD recordable, it's new
enough and small enough compared to LTO tape, that it's not currently
attractive to me. Of course, you can use several types of media, and you
really need geographic dispersion as well.

Tape is fine, as long as you keep renewing it, buying new media and copying
your stuff to it. Storing it with two or more high tier cloud providers might
also be a good gambit.

~~~
sdfghjkl34567
I'm responding to your comment here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9696575](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9696575)

Like I mentioned earlier in that thread, most armed clashes between antifa and
fascists are probably in Russia. There are more recent examples in the US as
well. I won't google for you but they are there. The Russian situation is
particularly violent.

~~~
hga
Did not know that at all, I'm not paying attention to Russia at that level,
and find it remarkable. Certainly the labeling of some Russians as "Nazis", to
a WWII focused at various times "old" guy like me. Thanks for drawing my
attention to this, although with a gangster regime like Putin's I've pretty
much written off Russia at this level.

(Note, to make sure I reply to replies to an 8 day old post referring to an
164 day old post, you're welcome to ping me by the email in my HN profile
info, you were lucky I saw this.)

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hga
"...the quarter-inch audiotape—first used in 1972...."

Not hardly; these were popular home devices in the '60s and per Wikipedia the
'50s, my family traded tapes with at least one of my mother's sibling's
families back in the '60s, and I got my own TEAC unit no later than Christmas,
1974, by which time the low fidelity tape cassette was becoming a big thing.

