Welp… There goes physical media…
Yep, I’m sure it’ll be gone Verbatim.
Take your upvote
Its an old code but it checks out 😅
It’s just one company, it’s not all the Blu-ray production stopping. I think the last time I bought any Sony recordable media was CD-Rs for my MP3 CD player in the mid 00s.
Sony owns the blu-ray format. I’m worried.
They do not own it, they did co-develop it. They’ve never owned it outright.
Why are you worried about Sony owning the blu-ray format?
If they’re decreasing their production, it could mean that physical media is ending. If so, that fucking sucks because you can’t own anything anymore
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You really don’t understand how Blu-ray works, do you?
Regarding Blu-ray as a medium for movies: Sony isn’t able do that kind of damage.
Blu-ray Association would go bananas:
What? No. If I write data to a Blu-ray it’s not encrypted. This comment makes little sense. Sony does not control “the encryption keys”, whatever that means.
It is if it’s a commercially bought product like a movie, for instance, and without media being sold on it, the media would be basically dead for most people
There’s still the super-DVDs, or whatever they were called.
mega-discs
You thought blu ray sales would just continue forever?
🏴☠️
I always preferred the rips fork Blu rays though. They had the highest quality video and audio and stuff. This sucks so much =(
EDIT: I just read someone else’s comment that although they developed it they don’t own it outright so that makes me feel a little better that hopefully other people can still make them.
How do SSDs and HDDs compare to optical disks in terms of stability in storage? SSD bits can lose charge over time until a lot of 1s read as 0s, right?
SSDs are pretty pricey for video. I use HDDs, mirrored. For some uses I put a SSD caching layer on top to speed up frequent R/W. Using only LVM, no fancy RAID hardware or anything.
ZFS FTW
I upgraded my datahoarding server to a pair of 18TB hard drives on ZFS with mirroring a little while back. It’ll be several years before I need to upgrade again, but I expect that when I do, SSDs will be cheap enough to go that route.
Already have a 10Gbps fiber connection to that server, so the hard drives are the bottleneck.
Commercially pressed discs don’t last forever, but longer than burnable discs. IIRC, they used to say 50 years for CDs, but in practice, it was a lot less. More like 20 or 30 if you store and handle them nicely. Easily less than 10 if you don’t.
Hard drives go bad over time; I don’t like trusting spinning platters much over 7 years. They can be OK, but they can suddenly stop working whenever.
SSDs are about the same as spinning platters.
I think we are talking about archival storage rather than storage in use. In which case hard drives can last decades.
I wouldn’t trust it that way, no. They might last decades. They also might not. It’s a gamble on any single drive, or even a few mirrored drives.
File system also matters. Modern ZFS has error checking that can handle some level of bit rot. Older formats generally don’t.
If it’s over 7 years or so, I want to get the data off of there.
Hard drives break down from use, not from sitting around. We aren’t talking about SSDs which while they don’t break down will experience data corruption over time. It’s not really a gamble at all with mirrored drives.
You’re also telling me things I already know. I already use ZFS. I agree that you should be using something with data integrity protection. Though ZFS isn’t always what you want for archival purposes.
Magnetic platters absolutely do break down from sitting around. Bearings and other mechanics can also go bad. For those things, a professional recovery operation could still get the data if you’re willing to pay, but the drive itself should be thrown out.
Edit: keep in mind that with bit rot, the drive may superficially function just fine. Your data may even be 99% correct. That 1%, however, could cause unrecoverable problems, such as videos that glitch in the middle.
That’s why you use multiple drives with bitrot protection. Modern SSDs and HDDs have protections against bitrot built in, including internal checksums.
If you are running your hard drives once in a while, then bearing failure isn’t really a concern. You probably should be doing that anyway to refresh the data and make sure it doesn’t degrade. Regardless people have had 10 year old drives of older spin up first time. It’s not likely you are going to have a mechanical issue on multiple drives anyway.
If you refresh an SSD once every couple of years it will last decades.
You keep doing this thing where you presume I don’t know about some issue. Rather I know about these things, but they have fairly easy mitigations or are already solved.
I guess hard drives and SSDs don’t count as physical somehow?
Even on a streaming service, the files are stored physically somewhere.
All media is still, technically, physical media.
Even when you stream it locally and don’t have access to the file itself, it physically lives in your RAM for the duration of the stream.
hard drives and SSDs don’t count as physical
When was the last time you walked into any store and bought a feature length film or tv show on hard drive or SSD?
Even on a streaming service, the files are stored physically somewhere.
What is your plan when the licence agreement for your favorite series expires on your chosen streaming service and no other streaming service picks up the show?
All media is still, technically, physical media
No one is arguing this. You’re making the strawman arguement. The not-so-subtle undertone of the article is clear.
Quoting the article:
The planned job cuts come amid a decline in demand for traditional storage formats such as Blu-ray discs, with streaming services now the norm.
…
The electronics and entertainment conglomerate will also gradually cease production of optical disc storage media products, including Blu-ray discs, according to the sources.
You will not be allowed to legally own tv shows or films and you should learn to like it. As I can tell from many of the other comments here, not many of us are fans of that idea.
What is your plan when the licence agreement for your favorite series expires on your chosen streaming service and no other streaming service picks up the show?
Watch the other millions of hours of media that’s been released in the last 100 years
When was the last time you walked into any store and bought a feature length film or tv show on hard drive or SSD?
Well not ANYMORE!!! Not since Best Buy stopped carrying physical media!!!
/s
This isn’t a hill I care enough to die on.
I’ve never bought a series in any format. It’s always been piracy and for at least the last 5 years catch and release.
What I mean is, I don’t want to keep series in any case.
That said, now I think about it, if I didn’t pirate everything then keeping copies of what I’d paid for world feel important
You are very much missing the point for the sake of a pedantic argument.
Someone else already perfectly illustrated the point in a comment below, so I guess I’m spared the effort.
it physically lives in your RAM for the duration of the stream.
It physically lives encrypted in your RAM and only temporarily. Remember TPM exists.
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Still there for the duration. Being encrypted just makes it akin to being inside a locked box. Being in RAM is like it being transferred in an escrow service.
I guess. Technically. I don’t usually count encrypted without the ability to decrypt as useful, but, I’ll give you the up arrow because technically correct is the best kind of correct.
Thanks, my point is simply just that data is still physical, no matter what.
A document locked inside a box that I personally don’t have a key to doesn’t make the document inside of it non-existent, just inaccessible to me, personally.
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No, the data is not physical, it is either magnetic or electric.
Since most people still store their media on hard drives most media is purely magnetic.
In a solid state drive storage chip the data is stored electronicly.
Thanks, my point is simply just that data is still physical, no matter what.
Turn off the PC and see how well that no-matter-what applies…
A document locked inside a box that I personally don’t have a key to doesn’t make the document inside of it non-existent, just inaccessible to me, personally.
What’s the point of having inaccessible data?
the term “physical media” typically refers to portable physical media, such as floppy disks, optical media, and other solutions such as tape.
This term was in wide use before portable hard drives became a thing.
the whole point is to stop you from owning physical media so they can arbitrarily raise prices by creating artificial cause and demand through artificial scarcity.
anyone remember when the argument for digital goods was " We wont have to waste money on boxes, printing, media, storage, or shipping! So your goods will be cheaper than ever, and everyone will still get a more profitable cut!"
Pepperidge farm Remembers, because Pepperidge farm called bullshit on the argument back at the very start, and said they would get rid of physical media, not lower prices, and that we would lose ownership of our purchases… and the internet poopoo’d me to hell in back calling me paranoid and stupid for it.
and look where we are.
and its so goddamn fucked up I don’t even get a single molecule of serotonin from being right about it.
The internet is chock full of idiots who piss all over Cassandra
who?
Not sure if joking, but just in case:
I would not in a thousand years have guessed greek mythology reference, lol
Now you know: you (and I) have the Curse of Cassandra
It fits.
Considering thats how its been my whole life.
Someone in my family once got severe burns on their hands cause i told them a pot was hot (It had been sitting on a grill, not like…a turned off stove where it had time to cool), to not touch it, and they rolled their eyes at me and said “what do you know” and picked it up… And yet it was my fault their hands were in bandages afterwards.
I dunno. Steam did it well enough. I was buying cheap games for years. I could get a kick ass GOTY game for like $5 while GameStop was still selling it used on consoles for $20.
You do realize you don’t “own” anything on Steam right? Every dollar you give them is towards a “subscription” to play the game.
While companies like Nintendo continually kill off game accessibility, Steam doesn’t really take away games from anyone. Digital distribution may not be ownership, but Steam in particular hasn’t given reason to worry.
For now but one day some corporation will buy Steam and turn into the endshitcation like all the rest.
Until that time will try to enjoy it while we can.
This is why I buy from GOG
While true for some games that require their online services. There’s nothing keeping you from downloading a game and backing up the install files on your own media to play later… A lot of games will run without steam open if you just run the executable…
That makes this even more depressing. Sailing the high seas is the life for me.
But where to store it all now?
More hard drives. RAID, rotate them out when they fail, more backups too. lol
Sounds pricey. Discs are cheap.
I’ve never had a CD/DVD R last more than a year anyway, even when using expensive media and slow burn speeds. So its not exactly archival.
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Agree its not great for very long term storage though.
What would be?
Which brand do you use? Not a single Verbatim has ever failed me, neither DVD nor Blu-ray. I also use a full-size burner with 12V SATA-USB adapter, not those stupid “slim” ones.
Thank your deity that M-Disc exists.
Doesn’t matter that much for Blu-rays since they’re non-organic anyway. It mattered more for DVDs since they use organic dyes, but I couldn’t find any M-Disc DVDs in Poland.
Except it’s time consuming and requires you to get up and physically insert the disc. Plus off hdd, you can easily stream it anywhere…
Jokes on Sony, they stopped getting my money years ago.
Damn, that’s some Qanon-level shit.
I mean, except it’s not a conspiracy. The death of physical media is an actual tragedy because digital media is nowhere near as free.
It’s to the point where much of the media I love is actually not available legally and officially for physical ownership, in some cases becoming actual lost media physically, and not available for purchase or even download anymore.
Companies absolutely want to control the consumption of media in more restrictive ways that they can control, it’s not a conspiracy, it’s the actual truth.
DRM, always online, digital only, subscription services - they are all designed to remove you further and further from being an owner.
Everything from video games, music, movies…all entertainment media is moving in this direction and it’s an actual tragedy.
becoming actual lost media physically
Reminded me of that Cowboy Bebop episode where they so hunting for a VCR.
and the fact that they’ve already done it with the disney vault.
Or… they’re stopping production because there’s very little demand. Nah, that can’t be it.
If you think the demand isn’t there, you’re out of touch. It’s certainly true that many consumers are choosing digital content, but it’s largely driven by it not having inconvenienced them so far too.
Everyone I’m seeing who lost the 3DS and Wii U stores, or lost access to all the games in their account, or even people who purchased media they can’t download and access again is realizing how big this problem is.
I found 8 brands of DVD±R discs—none of them Sony—before I stopped counting. If you think one company stopping production is going to stop people from using physical media, or that demand hasn’t been falling for years, YOU are the one who’s badly out of touch.
Let me spell it out for you: as long as there is demand, someone will find a way to make money filling it. No company, no matter how evil it is, can remove a product category from the market just by leaving the market. Suggesting that a company choosing to stop making a commodity product is an attempt to prevent you from having access to said product is nonsense no matter what company and product you’re talking about, because such a plan could never work.
How many headphone jacks do you see today? All it takes is one big player, and adoption can fall just like that.
And yet you can still buy phones with headphone jacks. Because there is demand for them. The reason you didn’t see many is because the demand is a lot less than what Lemmy users would have you believe.
After spending all that money and effort to kill HDDVD. 😆
That was 15 years ago.
So here’s how HDDVD can still win…
There is a ton of HD-DVD disc rot today. For a format, it definitely did not hold up to age.
I’ll be sure to buy extras, since it’s clear this is yet another push towards the consumer market not deserving to own their media.
Apparently “recordable media” here means the kind you can record on at home, e.g. CD-R, DVD-R.
Ah, now that makes more sense, my PC doesn’t even have a drive bay.
? . . . as opposed to - ?
As opposed to the discs movies are sold on.
Ah! Yes. Hm. Well then . . . where do distributors get theirs from? Not Sony, presumably?
Pressed discs have a completely different manufacturing method
? Did not know that. I assumed they were essentially WORMs but otherwise identical. Do they not use the same laser or something like that?
Pressed discs (like movies) are physically… pressed. They make a metal mould which is then stamped into melted plastic to make the pits and lands and then coated with a metal film to make the reflected backing, filling in the pits. This makes manufacturing of millions of disks extremely cheap since it takes seconds per disc. Burning commercial disks individually in thousands of burners would be way too slow/expensive.
Wow just like vinyl, sort of huh? That’s fascinating, I never considered it.
- as opposed to +
WELCOME TO THE RABBIT HOLE
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That one died a few days ago too.
Right as I’m getting into minidisc too
Eyyy yes! I just picked up an MZ-N505 a few months ago! It’s been great at work to quickly start music without staring at my phone for 5 minutes first.
I was just getting the hang of cassettes !
“Press Play on tape.”
(makes lunch)
“File found. Loading…”
(takes a bath, goes for a walk, reads a book…)
Ah the memories…
You can get some pretty cheap used ones. At less than $2 each.
Yeah but the thing that helps keep them at $2 is a supply of new ones
I think the data variant stores 1GB… good enough for archiving invoices and the like…
Damn. I was just starting to rebuild my physical catalog so I could get away from streaming.
Movies are not sold on recordable media, they are sold on pressed discs. There are a lot more manufacturers than just Sony too.
Keep doing it. Especially niche titles.
You think I can find tv shows like greg the bunny, or clerks the animated series? And then TV shows start retroactively saying whats ok to show and whats not. Then pulling the episodes from streaming.
Or maybe the rights run out, and no other streaming picks it up.
I’ve started building mine up again, too, because too often a movie I want to watch isn’t available to stream and purchasing a physical copy costs less than a digital copy.
thin laptops and LED Disco Cases killed CD-readers anyways. it’s a shame to loose a cheap way of making media archives, but it is what it is.
Lose*
Keep in mind that though this is a blow to the industry, it’s not like optical media is just yet dead. Hell, there are still new releases to DVDs coming out today.
Downgrading from blu-ray to dvd is extremely grim.
I guess current codecs can make miracles with 4GB of disk space
If I wanted to watch movies destroyed by compression, I’d go streaming. Blu-ray allows for way less compression. There’s a reason Blu-ray remuxes aren’t DVD-sized. Heck, some movies don’t even fit on a single layer Blu-ray! Do you want to compress that to 4.7 GB? And that’s only main title, without extras!
Space jam 3! And independent film featuring bugs 🐛 and a 🐇 bunny. The Matrix Housing Crisis… A film featuring Keanu as the one. He doesn’t collect enough retirement money so he’s out there pushing a cart. We saw a preview of him in “the matrix”. That bum in the subway… anyway good movie 😂.
So that they can fully control the fate of digital media for “normal” people. Better not lapse on that subscription or fail to upgrade to the latest Sony TV… “Your” media library might not like that, be a shame if you lost access to those pretty titles you love…
i can’t even remember the last time i saw an optical disc. it must be several years.
Found a small part of the problem.
Physical media is dying because the majority of people think just as short sighted as businesses do. Businesses think in short term thoughts like quarters. They do so because investers want immediate return.
But why would you as a person not want physical media??? I literally bought a George Carlin dvd of one of his HBO specials 2 days ago. It was traded into a local resale shop as “used”. It was brand new, because even though the plastic wrap was gone, the adhesive label at the top was still unbroken. Brand new dvd. $3.
Most people don’t know how to switch between inputs on their TVs or have gotten rid of their DVD or BluRay players at this point.
They’re using the built in streaming apps or they’ve plugged a Roku in where the cable box used to go.
dont know why youre being downvoted, this is completely true. The majority of people favour the convenience that streaming has represented, and TVs have been designed to turn on showing a shiny netflix icon instead of “Composite II” for like a decade now.
Yes, while consumers have been sold a double-edged sword/lie - the streaming companies were obviously never going to market their platforms by saying “one downside of streaming is we can take away content whenever we like”.
The average person with a bluray collection is going to be much more aware of the pros and cons of the formats - I’d be willing to guess most peoples family “collections” are still on DVD.
I’d guess that the down votes weren’t because it wasn’t true, but rather simply that the fact made them unhappy. Not the best use of down votes, but understandable.
With very little initial work, physical media is also very convenient.
I buy a disk, put it into a specific drive, get a instant message when its ripped, check its name and put it into a folder. From there my mediabox converts it to a managable size and adds it to the collection.
Whin I turn on my TV I see all these Movies and shows neatly presented by Kodi. I have a tiny Wireless keyboard and can start any in under a second. No buffering, no adds, no matter if the router is connected, and no fear of ever loosing access.
Its great.
Exeptions are there of couse, I would love to buy The Orville, but they just don’t want my money!
For me, physical media takes up more space. It’s a good thing and a bad thing. It takes up more space which means I need to have more space, but it’s also cool having the boxes and box art etc. Ultimately, as long as I own my media and it’s physically accessible to me (like located on my hard drive), then I am happy with that ownership and don’t have to worry about it being taken away from me. Also, physical media can be damaged which means it’s unusable entirely. With a proper RAID setup and backups, digital media can outlast physical media.
Blu-rays do not actually take up this much space: On a 1TB drive you can store about 10-12 4K movies. You need a backup and you need a second drive for your Raid setup. This takes up quiet a lot of space too.
Besides that: storing the movies on a Raid system is a lot more expensive. If I’d rip all of my blu-rays to a digital copy, I’d need like 12 TB of storage. In a raid setup with backup, that’s quiet expensive!
I meant physical size, not data size. With one computer with multiple 24TB drives, you can store hundreds or thousands of Blu-rays. To have that amount of physical Blu-rays, you would need a massive shelf - or more likely, multiple massive shelves.
True, RAID is more expensive, but it also ensures your data will keep working reliably - and it’s much harder to lose than a small disc. Doubly when you throw backups into the mix.
It’s not that big, the cases are much smaller than DVD cases. Each case is 12-13mm wide, so on a typical shelf, you could fit >60. You can easily make them two or three deep, depending on your shelf.
I just stick them in a box after ripping them to my HDDs.
Sure, but with a full-sized PC tower, you could reasonably fit thousands of Blu-rays. The physical size difference is pretty massive in that comparison.
Sure. I’m just saying storage doesn’t need to be overly burdensome. I just toss mine in a box and stick it in a closet. And if the drives die, you have the disks.
Modern hard drives come in 20 TB or larger. 4K movies don’t need to be anywhere near that big either with modern compression technology.
Which has its own downside, that being the up-front cost.
I don’t want physical media because it’s a liability. It can get lost or destroyed very very easily, especially optical media.
Digital copies are portable, I can data hoard them, and, worst case, I can just re-download it.
It’s very easy to make digital copies of physical media. The resulting copy is likely to be as high quality as you can find, and as portable as any digital copy can be. Pop it in a folder and point Jellyfin at it, and it’s available anywhere.
It’s also the easiest legal way to get a good digital copy.
And why on earth would I pay for media when I can get it for free?
My Plex server is packed with downloads and rips.
Because somebody has to create that media. And that person they have to live. (Or better that huge team when it comes to movies) So they have to earn money, so somebody has to pay them.
I also enjoy that today I can test if something fits me If I am skeptical. But I also always make sure to pay back creators for things I enjoy so that in the future there will be more things I enjoy.
Of course I understand anybody who can not afford media and am happy to subsidize them with the part I am paying for good shows. But if you have a Plex server, you can afford it. And If you say its close just start with things you like most and at least say “thank you” to them.
The creators get paid when they do the work, not from sales.
Also, a much more important note: if I couldn’t pirate it, I wasn’t going to pay for it anyway.
Where do you think the people who pay the creators get the money to pay them? From sales from the results of the last creators who worked for them.
You have to know where to look assuming you have working optics.
I also don’t care to look
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I quit optical media around 03. Haven’t even owned anything with an optical drive for nearly a decade.
same here. the last optical drive i had was used to rip my girlfriends dvd collection about 12 years ago. all still here on hunks of spinning rust if needed, but the space consuming load of dvds went to the flea market.
They’re a very common form of personal backup. A few discs and an USB writer and you get a very long lasting medium for passwords, personal files, family photos etc.
Can also archive multimedia of course, the smallest discs are 25 GB and can pack a few films, a season of a series, or a lot of music.
i guess, but they’re not great for backup. Eps. R/RW optical media doesn’t last that long (5-10 years) and is easily damaged. You’d be better off with tape for long-term storage. or an M-Disk or some similar magnetic backup solution.
optical media doesn’t last that long (5-10 years) and is easily damaged
I beg to differ. I’ve been backing things up to optical for 25 years now with minimal issues. CDs could be easily scratched but it hasn’t been the case for DVD and BR.
M-DISK uses in-organic substances that make the discs mostly immune to exposure but it’s a more recent invention. Proper storage and handling still goes a long way towards protecting discs even if they’re not in-organic.
M-Discs had merit in the DVD era. It’s a common refrain of those who don’t know the intricacies and read a wired article years ago to claim they mean anything in the Blu-ray era. They don’t.
Standard Blu-ray Discs have all the technologies that supposedly make m-discs so long lasting and as far as media that isn’t continuously updated and hashed from live storage medium to live storage medium (cold, archival storage unpowered) they are about as good as you’ll get.
They are much tougher than DVDs. Of course a variety of things go into how long a disc remains readable and without damage to data including luck with regards to no impurities in the batch. Even m-disc themselves based their longest claims off storage in ideal situations like an inactive salt mine (commonly used for archives by governments). Kept out of sun, away from extreme heat (including baking in uninsulated 120 degree F heat all summer year after year), away from high humidity and away from UV exposure to the data side of the disc as well as scratches and such and they should last a quarter to half a century, some more.
In the Blu-ray era m-discs are just an overly expensive brand.
That all sounds like it’s still terrible idea to use optical media for backups
Politely disagree. M-disc for BD-Rs are still absolutely worth the money if you want to properly archive something. NIST has agreed that the archival lifetime of a M-Disc BD-R is 100+ years.
You have to be careful with normal BD-Rs because there are two different types of recording material on the market: High to Low and Low to High (LTH). You want to stay away from BD-R LTH discs as their longevity isn’t as good as the High to Low discs.
Politely agree to disagree and I’ll elaborate. Thanks for your input.
LTH are all marked as such. MABL normal (non LTH) discs such as verbatim sells for less than half the cost of M-Discs have the same physical properties as M-Discs, the protective layers are the same, the recording methods are the same using the same materials. Therefore the longevity is the same or near the same without getting into M-Disc’s ridiculous marketing claims of 1000 years (when NIST and others agree the poly-acrylic protective layer would degrade and decompose after a century or two at most even in ideal circumstances).
/r/Datahoarder has had this argument several times and the consensus so far seems to comes out to the fact that M-Discs were a DVD-era innovation that in the BD era offer no meaningful advantages in technologies.
I’d rather have two BD’s from a reputable company like Verbatim (not fly by night plain white discount bulk BD’s from who knows where) from separate batches bought 6 months apart stored properly than rely on one overly expensive M-Disc that isn’t going to last any longer and probably isn’t made to meaningfully tighter tolerances.
NIST only estimates the lifetime of M-Discs, real world abuse tests on BD’s (non LTH, should have mentioned that to be honest) show good endurance that far exceeds DVDs. It comes down to however burning it right and storing it right. A pile of M-Disc left in a window in your uninsulated garage year after year and burned at 16x are not on the whole going to be in a better state in 20 years than a pile of BD-R’s burned at 4x, stored in protective sleeves in a case in a temperature controlled, insulated environment. Add in having a back-up copy and the chances of total data failure on both primary and backup disc and you’re looking at better survivability. NIST numbers generally assume things like storage in archival quality environments such as old salt mines which are a controlled environment, low humidity, neither excessively hot or cool and not subject to shifts in temperature. Most people can’t store things in an environment like that and those who can usually have the finances for a better solution like multiple tape copies and/or continually updating and refreshing hashed/checksumed files and moving on a schedule to new better storage mediums (e.g. keeping files in a raid array in a plugged in NAS, checking for failures regularly, replacing disks and upgrading disks every 5-10 years one at a time).
I wouldn’t trust any media not professionally stored in a purpose-built archival environment and with at least two copies to last more than 25 years without degradation or loss. Anyone trying to store stuff really long-term and cannot afford degradation or loss needs to have a plan to update their archival copies every 15 years or at least do an assessment that often and survey the options as well as the physical and ideally logical state of their chosen back-ups.
MiniDisks too? Nooo!
Wow I’m having a hard time believing that Sony of all people would abandon a technology
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You will own nothing and you will be happy.
