Hi, and welcome to Backup Central's Restore it all podcast.

I'm your host w Curtis Preston, AKA Mr.

Backup.

And I have with me, my spousal sickness consultant, Prasanna

Malaiyandi how's it going Prasanna?

I don't like to be your spousal sick consultant,

know, you know,

that means that your spouse is sick.

How's she doing by the way?

she's not doing too well.

She said she doesn't have COVID so we got that, but I think she, I think

she, um, I think she's got the flu, like the good old, the good old flu.

She, she never gets sick.

Like me.

I don't get sick very much and she doesn't get sick very much.

And, uh, she's um, you know, without, without medication she's

popping a a hundred degree fever and, you know, stuff like that, but

she's, you know, spirits are good,

but,

I think, especially during the pandemic,

the hard part is since everyone's been isolating for the most part,

yeah.

People haven't been getting like the common cold, the

flu, like the normal stuff that we have.

Yeah,

that things are opening up again,

people are interacting right.

All the rest of that.

It's like, oh yeah.

All those things that we used to get.

Yeah.

They're coming back.

And she's, she's convinced that she got it.

When I took her to go see, uh, top gun

Hmm.

which as you know, was my third time seeing it, um,

you have any comments you wanna give the

listeners regarding top gun?

You know, top gun is a hoot.

Like, I mean, if you, by the time this comes out, if you haven't seen it,

I don't even know what to tell you because by the time this comes out,

it might even, well, it'll probably still be in the theaters, but.

Yeah.

Uh, if you haven't seen it at this point, please go see it.

I mean, a, the movie business, believe it or not can use your money.

and we want the, we want the movie business to survive.

Um, you know, I'm a big fan of it.

We, you know, we need escape, right?

We need, and this is.

As good as it gets in terms of escapism.

There's some patriotism in there without being too overt.

mm-hmm.

there's, you know, there is an unnamed bad guy country.

And for those folks who've seen the original

love, the original and think that, oh, sequels never live up to the

This is, this is one of those rare cases where the

sequel is better than the original.

Um, there are a few movies that, that, that accomplish that I

can think of Godfather Two, um, Toy Story Two, right there.

There there's like a handful of movies that are as good at if, if not better.

And this is one where I wholeheartedly would say.

Better.

It's a better story.

It's certainly better.

Plane scenes.

Right.

And, and all the flight scenes are a thousand times better than I, I watched

the original top gun the other day, just to sort of compare the plane scenes.

It's not even close because back then they had to film actual planes.

right.

And now they film actual planes too, but they intermix it with special effects

planes and, and 3d rendered planes.

And, and they just, they just do things that just aren't possible.

that.

You know that yeah.

That weren't possible back then.

And the, and the story's really good and the acting's good, you

know, the characters are all good.

And, uh, yeah, it's just, it's just a good movie.

It's certainly my favorite movie of the year.

I mean, I don't know if it's gonna get best picture or anything, you

know, it's not the kind of movie that wins the best picture, but

and, and here's the question for you?

Have you talked about it on the other podcast yet with Jeff Rochlin?

I, uh, well, I'm waiting for Jeff to see it because that,

that is a, that is a spoiler full podcast.

Right.

So we, you know, we don't pull any punches.

So we say it right in the beginning, spoilers, you know, spoiler alert.

And so we haven't talked with him about it yet, but

Okay.

So for our listeners who go watch the movie, go check out the other podcast.

If you want to hear

is the things that entertain us, which Jeff Rochlin

as the host and I as the co-host.

So that makes three podcasts that I'm currently on.

Um, so

of that third podcast, you wanna

throw out our disclaimer?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

So yes, my employer is Druva.

Uh, Prasanna's employer is Zoom.

This is not a podcast of either company.

This is an independent podcast and the, the opinions that you hear

are ours and be sure you rate us at ratethispodcast.com/restore or.

Um, just go to, you know, if you're, if, if you're, if you're on apple

podcast, let's, let's face it.

Most of you are just scroll down to the bottom.

You get the stars, click the stars, give the comments and,

um, you know, and it helps us, it helps other people, uh, find us.

And then also, if you're interested in the kind of things that, that we're interested

in, we're gonna talk about something today that this is sort of like a full circle.

We, we, we got a guest on here.

Because he is a backup anorak, which is a word for someone that, that is, you

know, very enthused about these things.

And we backup anaraks is what we're all about baby.

And so we had, we had Daniel on Daniel Rose Hill.

Um, and then I, interestingly enough, I interacted with him.

Totally not even realizing I, I was interacting with him on a.

On a Reddit thread didn't even realize it was, it was Daniel that I

was that I was interacting with and he didn't realize I was in Reddit.

And then anyway, so we're the, the thing we're gonna talk about today

is inspired by the thread that I ended up interacting with on Daniel.

So this, this was for you buddy.

Yeah,

And, um, so yeah, so if you wanna, if you wanna be

on the podcast, if you wanna give us ideas, whatever, @wcpreston on

Twitter, or wcurtispreston@gmail, and, uh, you know, we'll make it happen.

We're all about pleasing the listeners out here.

, Prasanna Malaiyandi: Since you talk about

you would like us to talk about, right?

Tweet us, let us know.

We are happy to cover to, even if you don't wanna come on the podcast

to talk about it, let us know.

We're always looking for topics as well.

Like this one, this is, this is gonna be an

interesting topic that it, that we, we haven't, we haven't really covered.

I mean, we've covered bits and pieces of it, but never the focus coverage.

Yeah.

So, yeah, so, and, and by the way, I accept all DMS on Twitter.

So if you wanna DM me just, just DM away and, um, you know, I don't have to follow

you like the usual way, so, but, uh, what are we gonna talk about Prasanna?

today we're gonna talk about archival storage

Archival storage.

And is there a king?

Um, so we're gonna talk

Tape, no SSD!

Flash disc!

USB drives.

you name it?

We'll talk about it today.

these are all the things, and, and let's just,

before we get into that, let's just.

Remind our listeners.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I'll I'm just gonna say let's just cover the topic of archive

versus backup real quick.

yeah.

It's one It's one of

your

favorites.

Yeah.

It was one of my favorite archives.

Not backup.

Backup is not archive, backup and restore.

That is what most people think of when they think of backups, which

is, you know, I'm backing up my stuff in case it goes bye-bye.

In case I get ransomware in case my, my laptop just.

You know, dies, et cetera.

Um, and that should have a relatively short retention.

How long your retention for your personal data?

You know, that's, that's a different discussion.

Business wise.

I personally don't think it should be any more than two years if you've

got retention and, and, and that's only because sometimes there's

business files or data that's only looked at like once a year.

And so, because it's only looked at by once a year, you, you might not notice

that you're missing it until a year later.

And if you only had three months retention, you wouldn't be able

to be able to bring it back.

Or for some compliance purposes as

Well,

which

for compliance purposes, I actually think archive

is a better, a better, um, solution.

Right?

So archive is about.

Storing data for long periods of time.

There are various reasons.

One might do that.

One of them is compliance reasons, right?

You might have to archive all.

So if you're in the financial trading business, for example, you are required

by the SEC to archive, to record and archive all customer communications.

So chat messages, phone messages.

Emails, all of that.

Um, you're required to archive that for, I believe, seven years.

I think it's seven years.

Yeah.

yeah.

What's that

Yeah.

I believe it's seven years.

Yeah.

Yeah.

HIPAA requires you to restore stuff for the patient life plus something.

I, I, I don't remember the details there, but the, which

I always wondered about that.

Like, how do you get notified of when your patient died?

I don't know.

Anyway.

Today, what we're gonna primarily talk about is about personal archive

because business archive, it requires, I, I think, I think my differences for

business archive would be different than personal archive because although I think

everything I'm gonna say, you can learn from it for, for a business archive, but.

One of the big things that's gonna come into the discussion here is cost.

And with a business you can, you can pretty easily have a cost

justify.

Yeah.

To, to, to spend a lot more money than the

average user is gonna gonna do.

Yeah.

Um, and so this is, this is about.

The stuff that you really don't wanna say bye to, right?

This is about your, I don't know, financial records.

This is about your pictures of your kids.

I lost some pictures of my kids.

I hate that.

Right.

I lost some pictures before I got really serious about

archiving my own personal data.

Uh, I lost some pictures of some like trips to Europe, uh,

these days with smartphones and mirrorless

cameras and everything else, right.

You're shooting 4k video.

These are lots of data.

You wanna make sure you don't lose that footage, right?

Yeah.

And that, and that's exactly what happened with me was I switched the

medium that I was using to create.

I switched, you know, I went from back then.

You remember, we used to have cameras

Yep.

when I was moving from, from a to B I didn't, I wasn't,

I, I just got busy on the new thing and I didn't think about transferring

the old stuff into the new thing.

And before I knew it, it was all gone.

So this is about that stuff.

Um, And so we're gonna talk about the options.

And I do think there is a, a clear winner here for the home user and,

um, which if you're looking at the title of this, you probably already

know what I think the clear winner is, but we should talk about why.

Right.

So let's talk about the option.

So the first option I would say is disk, right?

Can I make a crazy suggestion even before disk.

Printouts.

right.

Just because, just because

for financial records,

Or, or even pictures.

Right.

Having negatives, just because we did have that discussion

with, um, Stuart Liddle right.

And he said, one of his ways that he had to deal with recovery was data entry

because they had printouts back then.

Right.

I think a lot of people do forget that.

Yes.

Having a physical copy and storing that, right.

Be it negatives or whatever else is actually a way to archive.

It is, I think it's

well, we're just, we're discussing we're discussing options, right?

Um,

Not practical, not scalable, but

yeah, it's better.

Like if you had printouts of maybe your most cherished photos, I

don't know if you'd create a, I mean, I I'd need, I've got way too

you need a full, you need a house to

store all the photos, right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But I, you know, financial documents and things like that, I'm actually

in the process of converting my, my paper, financial documents

into, you know, um, digital ones and then I have to store those.

Right.

But, and so I think of the paper option as probably the most, uh,

what's the word, um, Flammable

Yeah.

Yeah.

You have to worry about flames.

You have to worry about water damage.

You have to worry about all those other things.

And therefore, probably not the best medium

and if you have a bunch of paper getting it out of your house and

time of fire is just not gonna happen.

Right.

Um, so from a digital perspective, there are.

I mean, there's some mediums that really aren't accessible to the

home user or even used anymore.

Like we used to use microfish and things like that.

Um,

I would probably also even throw

but which kind of tape,

tape

well, we're gonna get to LTO.

I I'm, but, but the first one I wanted to talk about, which is

the one that most people probably think about is portable disc.

Um, and I'm gonna, we're we're gonna.

And I know the one you're gonna ask about and that's next, but I'm just

talking about regular USB disc and I think that's a horrible archive.

Medium.

Okay.

SP portable USB drives, you

Oh, flash drives.

Thumb drives.

thumb, like, you know, these little things, little

spinning, hard drives, connected via USB.

I think they are.

Like least reliable things.

Um, you know,

with you.

you can disagree.

You're wrong

Right.

I think it depends on the drives.

Right?

So in my mind, I agree that because of everything else we've talked about, right.

The fact that you have a spinning dish, you're probably keeping that dish right

next to where you keep everything else.

I you're talking about backup.

I'm talking about archive.

Sure.

Um, and because you need to store it for long and disks

do periodically have issues.

When you don't use it for long periods of time, I agree that that's probably

not the best medium, if you wanna keep a piece of data for a hundred years.

However, when I think about like what's available, what's easily accessible.

Right.

Um, and the fact that just like in tape, in the past, you would

copy things over from one to.

I could see a case where yes, I am using disk, but I'm only

gonna keep it for four years.

And then I'm sort of going to move my archive if you will forward.

I know you don't like that.

I know you don't like that.

I know you don't like that, Curtis, but I'm just talking from a practical sense.

Yeah, I just, I just think the fact

that, that you have bit rot.

The wor the worst bit rot that we're gonna have is on a, on a portable hard drive.

Uh, the, the bits are really, really small.

The, the stuff is hot.

You can probably accelerate that by not having it powered on

all the time and by accelerate.

I mean, I mean, um, increased the amount of time that it's not gonna have bit rot,

um, but I, I just, I just think given the other options that we're gonna discuss.

The only thing that a hard drive offers is ubiquity and inexpensive, right?

Yeah.

I, I wanna challenge your point about bit rot I don't think

it's the worst device for bit rot

what's the worst device

I would actually say for that, I'd

probably put a USB flash drive.

right, because that's gotta be powered on.

Yep,

All the time.

Yeah.

So yeah.

So SSD

archive?

Yes, exactly.

just, no, it is not.

This is, yeah.

Thanks for bringing it up.

That's why I didn't even put it on the

Yeah, but, but people would cons yeah.

People would consider it.

And why, why, why isn't that?

Why, why is that the case?

well, You shouldn't use it because like you

mentioned, SSD needs to be periodically powered on in order to refresh the

bits that are stored on the disc.

And if you don't power it on, then it just slowly vanishes over time.

I think I haven't found actual numbers.

I wanna say they say you should power it on at least like every

six months, at least at the minimum

in order

that just sounds like a horrible, you know, I, I want an archive.

I want somebody can set.

I want, I want somebody can ship it to somebody, put it on a

shelf and forget about it, right?

Yeah.

Um,

So, yeah, that's bad SSD or flash, uh, USB

right,

don't use either one.

The, um, and then right after disk is the, is RDX by

the way, which is actually disk.

It's just that it's designed for this.

It's designed for swapping in and, and all of that.

I still don't think it's a good archive, medium.

I think it's better than just a regular USB disc drive, but, um, It's slightly

more expensive, but again, I did, again, we're talking about archive, not backup.

We're talking about long-term storage.

I think disk is a bad idea for long-term storage.

And for people wanting to know more about RDX, go

listen to episode 1 56 data protection warrior explains LTO and RDX.

We had Pat Mayock from HPE.

Talk about, uh, both of those technologies.

Yeah.

I, if, if you wanna use disk as a backup medium, for example, I

think RDX is a great solution.

Um, it it's much less expensive than LTO, which would be the next choice.

So it's a much better solution than that for the home user.

And it's, it's a lot more.

Portable it's made to be portable.

It's made to be swapping in and out and all that stuff.

I think it's a great choice for backup.

I just don't think that disc in any form is a good idea for archive.

So the next thing that I think that we need to talk about is, is LTO.

Um, there are other tape drives, but there are even more expensive than

LTO . So LTO would be, there are, you know, I, I should have done that.

I'm gonna look it up right now.

I'm gonna go to Amazon.

yeah, and I think for LTO, it's not

necessarily the cost of the media.

That's a concern.

It's the cost of getting started by purchasing that tape drive in order to

be

is why I'm pulling it up.

Okay.

This is really funny.

I think it's like $1,800.

Um,

no, when I searched on LTO tape drive, the first, the first two

drives that came up were RDX tape drives.

Um, so in LTO, I'm looking for maybe an older LTO.

Yeah.

I mean, I mean, they're like, they're like a thousand dollars, like that's,

you know, uh, that's a, a new, right.

Here's an LTO six internal drive.

Uh, yeah.

So, so the, the drive is going to be very expensive.

The media will be inexpensive.

This is where it would have to be a, what I would think of as a power home user.

You need to have a whole lot of data.

This is for the guys on the data, hoarder plat the data hoarders

plat, uh, subreddit, right?

Hey, shout out to the, the data hoarders, subreddit, those guys, uh, you know,

They store an awful lot of data.

And, and when you're storing hundreds of gigabytes or, you know,

even terabytes LTO, baby, right?

The, the cost per gigabytes starts to come down as you store a whole

bunch, a whole bunch of data.

And it's about, you know, when you start buying a bunch of

hard drives that are that big,

The cost

start approaching, you start approaching

that cost of that tape drive.

So if you can get over that or what some people on the, on that sub right

to talk about, Buying a used LTO tape drive, um, on, you know, the, uh, what's

that place eBay and, you know, um, and you can get, you can get one for under.

Probably a few hundred bucks.

Um, I'm not gonna any support or anything, but anyway, why do I like LTO over disk?

And again, it's about, it is much better design as a long term storage medium.

The, the magnetic bits are larger.

The, the, the medium is colder or, or less warm.

Um, and it therefore.

Will be subject to bit rot at a much lower rate than the, than a disk drive.

And, and if you wanna know what we're talking about, uh,

look for the, what was that?

The tape drive designer schools, Mr.

Back up on.

Tape designers.

Yeah.

Episode 111 tape designer schools.

Mr.

Backup on tape with Joe Jurneke.

Yeah, uh, that one really discusses bit rot.

What it is, why it is and why tape is much like multiple orders of magnitude,

better at it than, um, than disk it's.

The, are challenges with.

Tape.

Tape as a long term storage medium.

Right?

You can argue that it's difficult to verify.

Um, I would say it's not that difficult if you, if you go with the, with

the LTFS format, for example, you can plug it in, put together a, a

little program that goes in there and does a check sum on all your files.

It's not rocket science.

It's just, it's not, doesn't happen.

Yep.

Mount it.

Mm-hmm easy.

Automat.

Automatically, well, it does auto.

It does happen automatically or can happen automatically if you're a business

user and you have a large tape library, you can actually tell it to go in and

compare all of its check sums to itself.

And you can tell it to do that on a regular basis.

That's something that a home user just not gonna be able to

do.

The other thing I would say about tape drives is you have

to be a little bit more careful in how.

In how you handle it.

Right.

Don't put it next to a magnet.

right.

But the same thing will apply for discs as well.

Right.

But you just have to be a little bit more careful where you put it.

Right.

Don't put it on like a shelf with a magnet lamp underneath, because that will

A magnet lamp.

What's a magnet lamp.

know, the lamps with the base that's magnetic that

you put to the underside of a shelf.

Sure.

So.

You never.

So like in offices, like you'll have like metal shelves.

And then, so this is what we used to have at one of the places.

In fact, Steven manly, uh, used to talk about this, cuz he used to work

on NDMP and tape drives, but he would basically do tape backups, put the tape

on a shelf and then try to do restores.

And he'd always end up with bit rot, right?

The tape wouldn't restore properly.

It turns out

yeah.

That rot.

That was

Or it would magnetism would flip the bits, but it's because

he would place the tape on the shelf and below the shelf, they had these lights

that would snap into the shelf by magnets.

Right.

So you can illuminate your desk.

And that would basically cause the flipping of the bits

I don't know about this story.

I'm gonna have to call BS on this story.

I'm gonna call Steven and

tell him, I, it is just, it takes a really powerful magnet, but you know, all you

gotta do is mess a couple of bits up,

yeah.

Yep.

So yeah, the, you, know, you have to keep it

outta heat, keep it out of sunlight and all that kind of stuff.

But I, I think that's true of many of

But it's more durable than like hard disk for

More durable and hard disc and designed to be shipped around.

And there's no,

Spinning

uh, technology, it's just literally just a spindle.

Right.

Um, and, and yes, it is, um, you know, rated for 30 years and

I'll, I'll stand behind that.

Right.

The, um, uh, and yes, you'll be able to get an LTO tape drive in 30 years.

Yours might die, but you get another one it's not,

It's backwards compatible at all the

rest as well.

Right?

Like you don't need to get the exact same.

Yeah.

It's not like a zip drive right.

Where they don't make them anymore.

Right.

zip jazz drives.

I remember

you can, you can still buy nine track tape drives.

I mean, they're, they're refurbished and stuff like that.

Not nine track.

I mean, yeah.

Yeah.

The, the real it's real.

Uh, that's what I meant when I said nine track tape drives not.

Okay.

Those were eight track

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Those were eight track.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

The ones that you put in your car?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

Yeah.

Um, the nine track were the, the big real reels that you see in all

the old movies, but you can still buy nine track, uh, tape drives.

You'll be able to buy LTO drives 50 years from now.

It's it's not crazy that that would

The nice part with going with like a standard like

that, because they ensure that it's continuing to be supported versus some

of the other technologies, which is more proprietary, which is once they go out

of business, you're a little screwed.

Right.

Exactly.

Um, so the next is, and I'm gonna put them sort of, I'm not even gonna

include CD, cuz it's just so small, but we'll talk about, and not, not regular

DVD, but talk about Bluray right as an archive, medium and, well, well actually

we're talking about consumer here.

So before, before I talk about Bluray, I'm gonna talk.

Nope.

Darn it.

I'm gonna, I'm gonna stick with my original plan.

Talk about Blu-Ray.

So Blu-Ray is like, I think these are in order of betterness.

Yeah, I just gonna say, yeah,

And the, the nice thing about Blu-Ray is that it's

not subject to magnetic bit rot.

But the way it works, it is an organic.

Um, die that is recorded on via lasers

yeah.

That's why you get like the etchings on the back of

right, right.

And it does have, or it can have bit rot and there could

be like separations of things.

It's not a perfect medium.

Right.

Um, I, I think.

And I think it, I think it's even more susceptible to

environmental issues than tape,

I think, especially when it comes to like light

UV, other things like that, it could cause it to break down much quicker

right?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

than they say it lasts.

It is very inexpensive.

You can get a, you know, a Blu-Ray writeable Blu-Ray drive for under

50 bucks and Blu-Ray discs are super

start

cheap.

Yep.

And

And I think they're about 20 and I think

they're about 25 gigs, right?

Per blue radius, 25 to

I think that's, yeah, I think that's the biggest that they come.

And the, just the challenge of that is, you know, how long.

It will last, you can have it tested.

You can easily just like the tape.

You can bring it in and, you know, have it tested.

You can also make multiple copies in case one of them goes bad because

the media itself is, so this, this is similar to the tape where you can make

multiple copies and you can distribute them, put them in different places.

Don't have them in your house.

You know, if your house burns down or gets flooded or whatever your

precious stuff can be somewhere else.

Um, The what I was, what I was thinking about talking about, and I'm gonna

talk about it just really quickly.

There is something, um, that called the, the Sony, uh, optical disc archive.

And it is, it takes that concept of a, you know, of a.

It actually started with Blu-Ray it now uses a different technology

inside, but what it does is it puts multiple of these platters inside

something that kind of looks like a tape

and it works kind of like internally it works kind of like a disc drive

in that you put one of these,

cartridges.

cartridges.

Yeah, that's right.

Cartridges into an optical disc archive, uh, player.

And.

And, and it's reading and writing from them at, uh, you know, simultaneously,

which is how it can have much higher write speeds than a typical Blu-Ray, uh, disc.

So the there's only one problem with the Sony optical disc archive.

Yeah.

Do you know what one costs?

Uh, I was looking at B and H photo.

It's pretty much the only place you can buy it, by the way.

That's another problem is that it's only made by Sony done.

If Sony decides to get outta this business, they're the

only one I know making it.

So it's not like LTO, there's multiple companies making it.

So if they decide to get outta the business, that's the end

of the world, the, uh, it's uh, roughly $10,000 for a new.

the

For the drive.

And then the, the media is like, It's I'd say it.

It's it's it's approaching tape prices, not as cheap as tape somewhere between

somewhere between tape and RDX from, from a price per gigabyte standpoint.

It let's just say once you've paid $10,000 for the drive, who

The media's gonna matter.

W. Curtis Preston:

media's not gonna matter.

W. Curtis Preston:

Uh, so I don't see that as an option for the home user and, uh, by the

W. Curtis Preston:

way, this whole, this whole thing, by the way, was caused by Daniel

W. Curtis Preston:

asking about the optical disc archive.

W. Curtis Preston:

On, um, on Reddit.

W. Curtis Preston:

And I was like, dude, he's like, is there any way I can buy one of these?

W. Curtis Preston:

We're like, well, yeah, you can go to B and H photo, just take out a loan.

W. Curtis Preston:

Right.

Well, and just given where he's located in Israel, dealing

with all the import duty taxes and whether he can get the equipment or not.

Right.

That's another can of worms

I didn't even think about that aspect.

So, uh,

But before we jump to, I think the next to the

one we actually wanna talk about, I wanna ask you, where do you think

cloud fits into all of this cloud?

Not at all.

Hear me.

you asked me a question.

no, like you have AWS's glacier deep archive.

You have other storage in the cloud intended for archival storage.

Do you think that the home users should consider those as a place to

store their precious data, right?

That they want to archive and keep.

Understanding that yes, bringing it back to from the cloud will be costly.

They will be paying sort of a monthly fee for storing the data.

They have to worry about how they get the data up there in the first place.

Maybe they use like a device, like AWS's snow cone to move the data

to the cloud, all of these things.

But we haven't talked about that yet.

And so before we get to the next topic, I thought I'd pick your brain.

Okay.

That, that's a, that's a, it's a good point.

And.

I guess it, it, it depends on the, the amount of the data.

If you're a very small home user and you got like, you know, a handful

of gigabytes of this stuff, putting it up, there's nothing wrong with

putting it into, uh, the cloud.

And I would definitely use something like glacier deep archive.

And the idea would be that you hope you don't ever have to pull it out

of there because it will be both.

It will take a while and you will pay dearly to pull it out.

Um, and, and that, that's also not the only option out there.

There are a bunch of them out there.

Right.

You know, just, just take a look at them, but the.

The concern that most of the people that I'm, that I think I'm speaking

to today is that for them, for the whole user, they don't like the

loss of control that the cloud has.

They don't like the fact that, you know, they're only paying a, a small

fee per month to Amazon or to whomever.

And that, that means that they don't have a lot of, of.

To use a Seinfeld.

They have no hand, right.

To use a Seinfeld reference.

They like the idea of having it again.

This is an archive.

This is my precious memories.

They like the idea of having it in their hot little hands.

But, but, but, but, but yes, I agree that archive

it's good to have in your hot little hands, but wouldn't you want something

off site as well, potentially for your archive, especially if this

is your precious things, right.

Your house burns down.

And so.

There's nothing wrong with having a copy there.

If you can afford it and you can get it there and all of that stuff.

Um, It's just that the whole point here is that it's going to be a really long time.

And I think over time, you're gonna be paying an awfully long, you know,

Yeah.

People

year archive for somebody,

people get surprised about the cost, even if it

seems like a very, very small amount as your data grows, your costs grow.

And then trying to get that data back ever becomes very, very expensive.

Yeah.

Cloud for backup and recovery.

Absolutely right.

For, for the home user, for all the users, for all the things I think cloud backup

and recovery, cloud disaster recovery, I think that's perfect use for the cloud.

Um, I get concerned when we start talking about storing stuff there

for 50 years because, um, you know,

You could afford that Sony optical disc at that

Yeah, you might be.

Yeah, exactly.

You might just take out a loan on that.

Right.

Uh, and by the way, any of the medium, any of the media that we are

talking about, I think you should be making multiple copies and you

should be shipping some of it offsite.

Right.

So we're definitely in agreement there.

So I wanna talk about the thing that, that, that I, that I know that Daniel's

been looking at a lot lately and, and that is, and, and actually I have to

thank Daniel for, I wasn't even aware of this format and that's why, that's

why I wanted to talk about it here.

And it's called M disk.

Um, the original.

Name came from the company.

Uh, what was it?

NCIA I think

I don't know.

Millenniata, I think is

there,

was millennia.

There you go.

The, um, so I'm gonna put the bad news first.

So first off, I think it's an amazing archive medium, and I think it

solves so many of the issues that we talked about, um, up to this point.

The, so let me talk about the bad first.

The actual company that came out with, with M-Disc is out of business.

Um, the, the M the Millenniata in M-Disc went out of business in 2018,

but, um, it looks like the, the folks that, that created M-Disc created

another company that it's one of these things where, you know, the company

went outta the business, but the people went on to form this other company.

So if you go to like, I think it's M-Disc.com.

Is that what it is?

Let's see.

Yeah.

M disc that's disc with the C M-Disc.com.

It's the same people that started it is just not the company,

not the original company.

So first off, what is it?

Um, it, it, is, it, it, if you just look at it with, you know, you

just saw it, you would think you're looking at a blue Ray or a DVD,

Yeah.

It's just an optical disc and looks exactly the

it's yeah.

Same form factor, but it it's apparently close to transparent, which is kind

of an interesting, which given what it actually is, I, I find that fascinating.

same form

But the different, the big difference is instead of using

an organic dye, they use inorganic material and essentially the, the way

they, it is proprietary and it is secret, but it is essentially they're, they're

essentially describing it as stone, right?

They're like it's etched in stone.

It it's an inorganic material.

Um, That does not have the bit rot issues over time that the organic dyes do that,

that the other optical platters use.

And the amazing thing is it is writeable in most modern

Blu-Ray but

if they, if they can write a DVD, a Blu-Ray generally

modern drives can write an M-Disc.

Having said that I, I, you know, I don't know what the full compatibility

is and your mileage may vary and all

But I think it can be played in any.

Device in any drive that can read a Blu-Ray

Yeah.

Which is fascinating.

This is one of those things where this is like the ultimate

sort of backwards compatible.

How did they make something that's completely different, but also compatible

with what was already out there?

That's I mean that kudos to the folks behind M-Disc and you know, maybe we'll

get, maybe we'll get them on here.

Uh,

I think Daniel had actually done a podcast, I believe with

one of the guys who created M disk.

Well then we got, we gotta get that guy.

If Daniel can get that

guy, we can get that guy.

We know Daniel, Daniel hook us, hook us up, man.

Um, but the, so.

so so that's the big deal is that it's this inorganic material that's

supposed to last a thousand years.

And this has been, I think I read that it had been

tested in France by some government agency, the D O D in the US.

Right.

They use this for thing, data that needs to be archived and stored.

Right.

So it's not like, oh yeah, here's this fancy tech and no, one's proven it

out, but it's actually being used by agencies which have strict requirements.

Yeah.

And, and there, there have been some, some independent reviews of it.

And like there's some guy that like torched it and submerged it and stuff.

This guy, microscopic uk.org, UK, that's quite the mouthful there.

Uh, he did a review of it.

Um, I'll, I'll say this, you again, I'll say multiple things.

When you, when you kind of look at it, like if you're just, if you're

looking at it for the, for the, with brand new eyes, the claims sound good.

The website is the website.

The review website is ma.

Um, and so you might like, because when you, when you go to

mdisc-com, for example, they haven't had a blog post in six years.

Um, they've got a couple of links that are bad.

So even the guys that are have taken over it, they haven't

done necessarily the best.

So why do I think this is such a good medium go, let's go back to LTO.

There are multiple companies that make m-Disc compatible drives

and multiple companies that make M-Disc compatible media.

Mm-hmm

Um, and they're companies that you already know, right.

If you just go to Amazon and you type in M-Disc drive, you'll find a

number of companies that, that make the drives and you'll find, um, and

by the way, the latest M-Disc media is actually a hundred gigabyte,

Yep.

It is more pricey though, but it is there,

Yeah.

Yeah.

The, um, I'm finding.

Yeah.

So like, um, 20,

right?

I think it's like

yeah,

25.

Let's see.

25, 25, 25 gigabyte discs is $65 and 25 100 gigabyte discs is $283.

That's a, but that's, that's two and a half terabytes.

Did I get that right?

That's two and a half terabytes of storage.

Yeah.

Now, again, if you're a data hoarder and you've got 30 terabytes

of storage, you're this is not for you.

I don't think this is for you.

This is for that person who has a bunch of stuff you can buy.

I don't know what the smallest chunk is.

You can buy, but you can buy a drive for, you know, around a hundred bucks.

They, they look to be a little bit more expensive than just your average.

Uh, BDR drive, but, and you can buy the media and there are several drives.

And again, the, the drive it's made backwards compatible.

That's really important thing it's made back.

So even if tomorrow, all the new media stop being made and all the drives that

could write to it, stop being made.

The fact that you can read it in the existing Blu-Ray drives,

I think is says everything.

And that's what I like about this.

Oh,

What do you

Oh, I, yeah, no, I'm glad that Daniel kind of pointed us to

it, cuz yeah, I had never heard about this before, but it is very, very fascinating.

And if it could live up to the fact that yeah, it doesn't degrade over time.

Like I, I was going through and cleaning up the house and I just had so many

CDs and DVDs lying around the house.

I'm like, there is no way that this stuff will be able to be read anymore

because they're all like 20 years old.

Right.

When's the last time you tried to read a

20 year old CD or DVD Curtis?

Are we talking commercial DVDs

or home written DVDs?

Yeah.

Um, a little while ago, actually.

I remember pulling out some stuff that I had written.

Yep.

Did it actually, were you

uh,

were you able to actually read it?

Okay.

But it's like those sort of things.

It's like how much longer will they last?

Yeah.

I don't know.

I don't know what the Blu-Ray, I don't know what Blu-Ray are, are rated at.

Um, I think DVDs, not Blu-Ray DVDs, DVDs are rated better, but,

um, but they, you know, they're so much smaller and, you know, um,

etcetera, et cetera, but I don't know.

I like the idea that it's an inorganic layer.

Um, I like the idea that there are multiple vendors that sell the media.

There are multiple vendors that sell the drives.

So it's more at this point, the founders, I, I guess they're

probably living off licensing, right?

Cuz they're not, they don't sell the company that they're essentially,

as far as I can tell they're they're just marketing the idea,

yeah, and

M-Discs.com.

mdis.com.

and I think that's probably the challenge to

getting consumers, to actually adopt this technology because most people

don't even know M-Disc exists.

Right.

Just like

Well, that's about to change after this episode!

It exists.

but I think right.

That's probably a fault on the company side.

Right.

It's if people knew, I'm sure more people would be looking

into it as a potential option.

They can start by updating their website and fixing

broken links and you know, and not having six year old blogs that actually

don't really talk about their medium.

Um, yeah, the blog is, I don't know, it's a nice looking site,

but the blog is not the best part.

The,

folks.

If you need some ideas, reach out to us, we will be happy

to provide you some input.

Yeah, absolutely.

Uh, so far you've received unsolicited input already.

but your website looks, but I love the, I love the idea and I

think that this is the ultimate archiving medium for the home user.

Right.

Um, the, I, I haven't found it.

I I'm sure there's somewhere that you could probably buy a

handful of these discs that you don't always have to buy 25 pack.

I don't know if that's the case.

It it's probably way more expensive for a disc to do it that way.

Just like it is with Blu-Rays.

yeah.

But I just, I don't know.

I just really like the fact, again, the fact that they made it backwards

compatible with the regular Blu-Ray drives the fact that there's

multiple companies that make the media and one of which is verbatim.

Right.

Which is, you know, that there's multiple companies that, that whose

names that you recognize and there's multiple drives that to, to write it.

So if you, if you're interested in the hundred gigabyte disc, make

sure that the drive that you buy supports a hundred gigabyte disc.

I don't know if all drives support that.

So anyway, I think this is a good discussion.

I hope, I hope, I hope you guys, I hope you enjoyed this Daniel.

This was this literally all for you.

This was, this was for an audience of one.

Yes.

uh, hopefully we have more than more people in that

listening, but, um, So thanks Prasanna.

Thanks for the chat.

now I'm gonna go think about my archive strategy.

Yeah.

And thanks to the listeners.

We're nothing without you.

And remember

to subscribe.

So you can restore it all.

There you go.