Not just that, but it's just plain cheaper and more efficient with commonplace broadband. You don't have to pay for making CDs/DVDs (paying for a master is quite expensive, and the rewriteable ones have poor shelf life and can't be mass-produced nearly as quickly), you don't have to pay for postage, and you're not stuck with whatever's on the master since you can just update your data in your datacenter at any time.
I'm just sad that no one's come up with a really good, user-writeable long-term bulk storage solution. CD-Rs and later DVD-Rs were supposed to serve this need, but while they seemed like a ton of space in the 90s, they're tiny now, and later we all found out, the hard way, that the stupid things decay rather rapidly. Now we have BD-Rs but here again the storage size is just too small, and only a fool would trust them to last.
IMO the concept of long-term bulk storage doesn't really make sense: Most of your stuff will be recycled by your grandkids.
While you're alive, you can just buy a couple of NAS, stash one at a friend's/parent's place, buy the cheapest $/TB storage, use raidz to automatically correct errors over time, and set it up to email you every time it had to resiver to a hot spare so you can buy another HDD
>only a fool would trust them to last
Heh, head over to /r/DataHoarder to see more of that. "but this time it's different, my coasters don't use organic dyes!"
And you need to keep the bits on current technology. That is the real gambit.
So your NAS idea is probably the best with the caveat at your need to upgrade it regularly as well.
Compare it to a floppy disc from your grandparents. Not that bad for 3,5"? How about 5,25"? No? Then 8". These are now hard to come by. And this is just in the time span of 30-50 years.
The best bulk storage format was actually available early on and very shelf stable if treated reasonably: Paper tape. Low density and readers are hard to come by today.
Your primary point that our grandkids won't care is on point. We would drown if we keep everything.
But the counter point would be that if we do not even try to preserve anything we would probably end up with nothing.
But for every average Joe who does not care we seem to have plenty data hoarders to make up for that.
I disagree a bit. Some things might require long-term data storage. For example, GPG keys, personal wallets, private documents and certificates.
Imagine how much of your life can be wiped out by a Carrington Event, which is not that unlikely.
I don't trust clouds for this. Right now, archival-grade DVDs are not a bad option. Almost 5 GB, and under good storage conditions these can last >50 years, probably more.
Have you considered 100GB BD-RE? These are rewritable, but that is only the byproduct of being a phase-change medium, which is also >50 years and thus has a longer shelf life than the standard WORM BD/DVD.
I am using them and can say only good things so far.
This is true, but depending on what the data is, hopefully that stuff could be donated to a library if the stuff lasted long enough to go into the public domain. Of course, if it's family videos, no one's going to care about that crap, but if it's pirated movies or whatever, some of that stuff might not be available otherwise. Just look at all the classic games from the 70s-80s that would be gone forever if people hadn't copied and distributed them.
Based on the whole recent VCF ordeal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40005150 , donating any of this crap to a library or anyone else and it actually being used is a pipe dream. These organizations don’t have the time or space to process anything, assuming they don’t have it anyway.
Likely only the now deceased owner knew that they had xyz special material. Their kin processing their attic or garage likely don’t.
Why would people not care about family photos? All the stuff in the background is super useful for historians.
Keep in mind: old data is tiny by contemporary standards. So your grandchildren can just take the few TiB in your personal collection, and stick it on a futuristic thumb-drive somewhere. Barely takes up any space.
>Why would people not care about family photos? All the stuff in the background is super useful for historians.
That's a good point actually. Most people aren't going to care at all, but historians might, plus also movie-makers: it would be really useful to them to see real photos and footage from the far past.
Even just from one or a few decades ago is super useful.
Note also how typically the ads are the most fascinating parts of old media, be that newspapers or even TV recordings. All while contemporary arts are universally seen as annoying.
>Note also how typically the ads are the most fascinating parts of old media, be that newspapers or even TV recordings. All while contemporary arts are universally seen as annoying.
Ads are all annoying, contemporary or not. The old ones are only interesting because they're novel, and you're not watching them every day. You can see the same thing by traveling (or better yet, moving) to a foreign country and watching the TV ads there: they'll be interesting or entertaining for a few minutes, but will quickly become annoying after the novelty wears off.
Ads in old Computer Shopper magazines are interesting to people here because they're interested in computers and computer history, but they're not interesting to other people. But again, after you've looked through an old magazine full of these things, you'll tire of them.
As for ads being more interesting than "old media", that depends on the media. If it's classic old movies like Hitchcock thrillers or whatever, then definitely not. Movies like that are interesting and entertaining to watch even today. No one in their right mind wants to watch 2 hours of nonstop TV ads from the 1950s, by comparison.
Other stuff, it really depends on your interest, and how useful the information is to you now. Are you just satisfying curiosity about history? Or trying to solve some kind of problem that requires historical knowledge? Whatever you're researching is probably more interesting than the ads, though those might be interesting on their own too, to an extent.
I found those things quite fascinating, and if it's as small as a few hard-drives (and not something as big as eg a car), I would definitely keep it around.
- Most people are not as interesting as they think they are
- It's unlikely that your grandkids would have the same interests as you
- If anything in your NAS was relevant to the family, your SO would have kept a copy of it in her icloud instead of using your self-hosted photo viewer over tailscale
- Once you're old you almost certainly won't be using modern software and file formats. Accessing your data will be incredibly inconvenient
>Once you're old you almost certainly won't be using modern software and file formats. Accessing your data will be incredibly inconvenient
This isn't true. Sure, no one uses WMV or ZOO these days, but you can still get tools to read them. But those were also not-so-popular formats/codecs that were replaced quickly by better stuff. MP3 is also old, but still very ubiquitous. Furthermore, the specs and software for modern file formats (like audio/video codecs) are all publicly available. People will still be able to read h.264 videos 50 years from now, don't worry.
> - Most people are not as interesting as they think they are
> - It's unlikely that your grandkids would have the same interests as you
The bar is pretty low: your grandkids only need to be interested enough to keep some tiny amounts of data around. (Assuming that data capacities keep growing, your perhaps dozen of TiB of data will fit on a thumb drive in the future, or perhaps even an email attachment.)
Also your descendants don't need to find your data interesting for the same reasons you do. You might snap some pictures of your travels to famous landmarks (which your grand kids don't care about, because they can't find much better photos of the Eiffel Tower online), but they might be interested in how fashion changed over time, or weight or smartphones or whatever is in the background.
It's very, very hard to preserve only exactly what you do, and nothing else. There's always context, and people might be interested in the context, even if they ain't interested in you.
Btw, there's lots of diaries and autobiographies published. Some of them quite popular.
They did. And if you have a newer drive it is already supported on your DVD or Blu-Ray. Can be read by all drives but requires a recent firmware to be able to write.
An example drive would be Asus BW-16D1X-U.
It is supported by the major drive manufacturers but it seem the media is only produced by CNC Magnetics or Mitsubishi Chemical. Sold by brands such as Verbatim or Ritek.
The hard part will actually be to get hardware in 100 years which can read this. So it will not be write and forget. But reasonable shelf life should at least be available.
DVD-R’s are actually still super commonplace in the medical field. They’re the perfect way to provide patients their medical images in a cheap physical format that is readable by all electronic medical systems.
They are not the perfect way to get medical images. A friend called me last week to borrow my external drive because the MRI place gave him a stupid CD he had no drive for.
For what these places charge they should be giving out USB drives like candy. They are so cheap that Micro Center sells 64gb at the counter for like $3 or something. CD/DVD is not a valid option.
Cheap "Chinesium" USB drives can be wildly unreliable, plus they're not write protectable meaning your data could be overwritten or deleted by a shitty app/antivirus, or just get malware transmitted over it.
Optical media has the native feature of being written in immutable sessions so your older data is always preserved instead of overwritten(excluding RW media), and also can be write protected when desired by finalizing the session, plus its long data retention shelf life for archiving purposes compared to cheap flash, all make it a great choice for the uses cases of the medical industry file transfer or personal archival at home.
cheap USB drives have bad data retention. they will not be readable 3 years later if left unpowered and without a chance to relocate/rewrite data. DVD-Rs will last 20ish years
Kaiser emails you the DICOM medical images along with an app for reading them. Most hospitals offer this so I'd expect medical DVDs to die in another decade. The vast majority of PCs and laptops don't come with optical drives and that's been the case for many years now.
>Kaiser emails you the DICOM medical images along with an app for reading them. Most hospitals offer this
Not in my country. Due to strong data protection regulations most radiology shops don't Email the x-ray files to you. They either send it directly to your GP via the official government mandated channel, or they hand it to you physically in print or disc but never email due to the chance of not arriving to its destination or worse, going to someone else due to human or technical errors.
>The vast majority of PCs and laptops don't come with optical drives and that's been the case for many years now.
That's irelevant because they're not made for you to read them at home but for your doctor or other healthcare facilities to read them, and all these businesses have disc drives on premises and will most likely do so for decades
Unfortunately, drives are not so common these days. I had to go buy an external USB DVD drive to see the images given to me after a scan, just last year.
How about, hear me out for a sec, you email/file-share the data off the disc to the doctor abroad in those cases when you need to. Mind-blowing, right?
If it's indeed a life saving situation as you say, a doctor will have to do scans there and not wait to receive possibly outdated imaging data from another country
Also, no hospital in my country is just gonna release my private medical records on the spot because a doctor from another country called and told them to. There's some formal paperwork that needs to be signed by the pacient and if you're in a coma then you can't sign it and if it's an emergency you don't have time for that whole process so they'll have to perform the scans there.
The case of having to quickly send/receive pacient data to or from doctors abroad is not something most public hospitals in my country are prepped for not will they since it's super niche case and in case of emergency they'll do the scans on the spot.
I'd say never because no sane medical professional will be operating or doing any procedure on "some CD from somewhere", pretty much the same with mailing that out.
They want scans/tests from trusted source to make decisions about person health/life. The only thing they can trust is whatever they have close and used for years.
If there is no time to get a new scan/test I think there is no time to download stuff or wait for someone to email things.
Idk; we don't live in the cdrom world any more, it was replaced by high speed internet. The rest of this comment thread seems to answer as if we are asking this question today; and not in 1994 when 56k modems were still a thing and cds were routinely mailed.
I brought my CT scans on disc to my ortho who didn't have a CT machine in the last 300 days.
I have a hard time believing that it’s possible to set up a legal and technical framework where patient data can be safely accessed internationally faster than doing another X-ray or whatever might be currently distributed by CD.
Are you serious? You can call pretty much any hospital in the US and request DICOM files sent to your email. Mailing a CD across the world is insane, as is wasting money and radiation budget on yet another CT scan
No serious operation or procedure will be done by any doctor having some mailed x-ray photos.
They will do new one right there and if there is no time - there is no time to mail stuff around.
What kind of nerd fantasy is it?
I went once with x-ray on cd that was weeks old for procedure - doctor there went “yeah cool, I don’t care, it is my risk we do new one by personel I know on equipment I know”.
Is this a regional difference? In the US, my experience has been like the other poster, it's normal for them to wait days or weeks for xrays from radiology specialty places. Maybe it's a rural thing where many providers don't have their own radiologist and end up outsourcing it.
I think the distinction is, the Dr orders the x-rays from a place they have a relationship with and waiting for it, vs, you bringing x-rays from some unknown source.
Which country? I am absolutely sure that here in the Netherlands its never the case. Always by email or printed in rare cases. Less than 1% owns a optical disc nowadays.
I would expect most people have at least one CD hidden somewhere in an attic or similar.
I don't have an optical drive connected to any working PC (nor a music CD player) myself, but I still have some CDs lying around the house. Eg a book about learning guitar that I bought second-hand came with a CD.
I imagine they meant drive (not just media). But agreed, do people with game consoles (that splurged for the drive), CD/MiniDisc/SACD/DVD/BluRay/HD DVD/Laser disc players, CD/DVD/BluRay burners, older cars, older PCs/laptops/Mac minis, boom boxes, CDJs.. or multiples thereof not bring the average up?
I have a PERL Cookbook with a mint CD sealed in the cover.
I don't know about a percentage of households I know, but I do know of several households with literally zero means to play back any physical media. No DVD or Blu-ray players, cars don't have CD players, no computers with optical drives, no game consoles, only maybe a Switch for a game console.
I imagine it's still far from most, but it's definitely starting to be a thing.
Oh, I certainly believe there are plenty of households that don't have any devices that play back optical media.
Apart from some very old laptop (which might or might not work), my household doesn't have any CD nor DVD nor Blu-Ray etc drives. No car either, so we couldn't have a CD player in there.
I just doubt these optical-drive-less households like mine form 99% of all households.
I suspect the percentage of drive owners is a lot lower. But I don't think it would be as low as 1%?
If you restrict to 'drives connected to a multi-purpose device so they can eg display medical images sent on disk' the percentage goes lower (but not sure whether all the way to 1%), because most people wouldn't try to use their game consoles for that.
I hate this about that field. I had to scrounge up an external DVD drive from the garage, convert the images and load them onto a medical imaging app on my phone... so that I could show the doctor, who otherwise had to keep going back and forth to another room in the clinic to talk to the tech.
I don't understand why they can't just load it on a website (like MyChart) like any other lab data. The images are big (contains more than pixel data, like xyz layers and gamma) but still compressible.
I don't know if it's HIPAA or tradition, but it really bugs me that I have to keep a DVD drive around solely for imaging. It's like the situation with the IRS and faxing :(
I often request Canadian government records through freedom of information, and they keep sending 10mb PDFs on CD-Rs. They’ve improved a bit recently, but was annoying for a while.
Also learned that a PS4 (or was it a PS5?) cannot open PDFs :(
Archive tape existed well before and well after optical discs.
These days, you can fit up to 18TB on a tape.
OK, so some smartass will pop up and say that doesn't even fit a RAM dump from some machines, but for most archiving purposes, tape has been consistently the best option for the past 50 years.
I'm just sad that no one's come up with a really good, user-writeable long-term bulk storage solution. CD-Rs and later DVD-Rs were supposed to serve this need, but while they seemed like a ton of space in the 90s, they're tiny now, and later we all found out, the hard way, that the stupid things decay rather rapidly. Now we have BD-Rs but here again the storage size is just too small, and only a fool would trust them to last.