[Bobboau]

http://www.engadget.com/2016/02/16/5d-discs-can-store-data-until-well-after-the-sun-burns-out/

[Mammothtank]

Well I know what I am storing my Season 1 of Digimon on  . Pretty incredible though.

[Bryan See]

I hope I can store anything I have on these as well

[AdmiralRalwood]

360 TB per disc

...Wow. Okay, but what's the access speed on that?

[Bobboau]

sounds like the data is retrieved via measuring light polarization, so my guess would be pretty fast, and highly scaleable.
the big drawback seems to be it's hard to write to, so this would be at least initially a read only data storage technology.

[The E]

I think it's going to stay read-only. This sort of stuff is mainly archival, anyway.

[karajorma]

In the three years since their first demonstration, they've essentially perfected the recording technique and have since recorded the entirety of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Newton's Opticks, Magna Carta and Kings James Bible.

So maybe 1 MB of data then?

Does the writer really think that the people reading their site are so computer illiterate that we don't know how much space it takes to store text? The Magna Carta is like one side of A4. It's a readme file.

Why not tell me how many seasons of The Simpsons it can hold instead? Cause the choice of data they talked about suggests that the 360 TB limit is theoretical rather than the much smaller actual limit.

[Bobboau]

I think it's going to stay read-only. This sort of stuff is mainly archival, anyway.

oh, you think a technology described as hyper resilient to the point of outlasting the sun and star formed from the remains of the sun and the star from that one's ashes, might be difficult to modify to be mutable?

[The E]

I have that feeling, yes.

[karajorma]

I tend to take this sort of claim with a salt shaker rather than just a pinch. I remember watching Tomorrow's World where they demonstrated this new hyper-resilient storage medium by pouring honey on it and then just wiping it off to have it work perfectly.

Of course these days we all know that you're probably just going to **** up your music collection if you try that with your CDs.

[Sandwich]

I'll believe the longevity claims once they have some hard data to back it up.

[Bobboau]

hey if my MP3s are not still playable 4.9 billion years from now I'm gonna sue!

[Klaustrophobia]

I read something recently that made a pretty solid and not often talked about point toward the whole long-term data storage thing.  The medium isn't even really the problem.  It's formats and standards.  Think of the kinds of programs and files created just a couple decades ago that are already obsolete and difficult or impossible to access on modern hardware and software.  Where is there a card stack reader outside of a museum these days?  Who has a computer with a tape deck reader?  Or even a floppy drive?  Hell, I've got papers I wrote in high school saved in a format that was a competitor to MS word that's long gone.  The only way I have to open those now is try to find the original install disk from the mid 90s at my parents' house.  Now extrapolate that hundreds or thousands of years to the future.  Just saving digital data isn't really going to do us much good.

[zookeeper]

I read something recently that made a pretty solid and not often talked about point toward the whole long-term data storage thing.  The medium isn't even really the problem.  It's formats and standards.  Think of the kinds of programs and files created just a couple decades ago that are already obsolete and difficult or impossible to access on modern hardware and software.  Where is there a card stack reader outside of a museum these days?  Who has a computer with a tape deck reader?  Or even a floppy drive?  Hell, I've got papers I wrote in high school saved in a format that was a competitor to MS word that's long gone.  The only way I have to open those now is try to find the original install disk from the mid 90s at my parents' house.  Now extrapolate that hundreds or thousands of years to the future.  Just saving digital data isn't really going to do us much good.

That's of course true to a lot of formats, and if for whatever reason you needed to save something to last a really long time, you should do it in some kind of really basic format. Assuming that the future audience is interested enough in your data to spend a bit of effort on decoding it and has at least enough technical competence as us, they ought to be quite capable of figuring out that your text file is encoded with UTF-8 which history says was all the rage back around 2000, or that your image file is just a rectangular block of raw 8bpp pixel data.

Rare proprietary binary formats might be inaccessible, unless they have the dusty archives of the old world preserved and an assistant AI which they can set to the task of figuring it out, but it seems likely that knowledge regarding the structure of most common basic file formats and standards today will survive anything except major technological collapse, or at least long enough that no one would be interested in it anymore anyway.

[MP-Ryan]

If it can store up to 360 TB via physical dimensions, the best format is probably physically-generated audio anyway.  It's compressible, and then all you need is the hardware.

[Dragon]

That does sound pretty interesting, but I suppose it isn't something that's going to be boxed up in a hard drive case. It'd be nice for archivists and the like, anyway.

So maybe 1 MB of data then?

Does the writer really think that the people reading their site are so computer illiterate that we don't know how much space it takes to store text? The Magna Carta is like one side of A4. It's a readme file.

Why not tell me how many seasons of The Simpsons it can hold instead? Cause the choice of data they talked about suggests that the 360 TB limit is theoretical rather than the much smaller actual limit.

I think that they meant that they stored the images of those. As in ultra-HD scans of the documents. I've seen that for some reason, people in that field not only want to archive raw text, they want exact scans of the source documents, often in an absurd resolution.

[Det. Bullock]

That does sound pretty interesting, but I suppose it isn't something that's going to be boxed up in a hard drive case. It'd be nice for archivists and the like, anyway.

So maybe 1 MB of data then?

Does the writer really think that the people reading their site are so computer illiterate that we don't know how much space it takes to store text? The Magna Carta is like one side of A4. It's a readme file.

Why not tell me how many seasons of The Simpsons it can hold instead? Cause the choice of data they talked about suggests that the 360 TB limit is theoretical rather than the much smaller actual limit.

I think that they meant that they stored the images of those. As in ultra-HD scans of the documents. I've seen that for some reason, people in that field not only want to archive raw text, they want exact scans of the source documents, often in an absurd resolution.

When I did germanic philology sometimes there were different transcripts of the same text from the same manuscript, medieval writing often was meant more to look pretty than intelligible and when it wasn't pretty, it was a botched attempt at looking it so even worse in terms of intelligibility, the raw scans are necessary to avoid artifacts that can mislead attempts to interpret what is written, and while a lot of handwritten or early printed texts fare better they stil have enough room for misinterpretation to warrant a very high res scan for preservation purposes.

[Dragon]

That makes sense, though I don't think UDHR really merits the same treatment as Magna Carta or King James' Bible. I didn't see how the actual writing in Opticks (as opposed to the first page) looks like, but from my experience, stuff from that time tends to be fairly readable as well, if you're willing to get past antiquated orthography and other quirks of the era.

[Det. Bullock]

That makes sense, though I don't think UDHR really merits the same treatment as Magna Carta or King James' Bible. I didn't see how the actual writing in Opticks (as opposed to the first page) looks like, but from my experience, stuff from that time tends to be fairly readable as well, if you're willing to get past antiquated orthography and other quirks of the era.

That's debatable, even if it's not "important" they still have archeologic value and such preservation efforts are also for that purpose not just for preserving the text itself, a low res scan may delete quirks in the way a text has been printed that would be invaluable to some researchers and this wihtout having to get the text itself out of its vault.

You learn a lot about those things when you study literature, if I wasn't stuck trying to learn enough of a third language I couldn't study before my twenties (small island school, so only english teachers) to get my degree I'd probably be diving into that kind of research that involves manuscripts and old printed copies, sigh.

[jr2]

I read something recently that made a pretty solid and not often talked about point toward the whole long-term data storage thing.  The medium isn't even really the problem.  It's formats and standards.  Think of the kinds of programs and files created just a couple decades ago that are already obsolete and difficult or impossible to access on modern hardware and software.  Where is there a card stack reader outside of a museum these days?  Who has a computer with a tape deck reader?  Or even a floppy drive?  Hell, I've got papers I wrote in high school saved in a format that was a competitor to MS word that's long gone.  The only way I have to open those now is try to find the original install disk from the mid 90s at my parents' house.  Now extrapolate that hundreds or thousands of years to the future.  Just saving digital data isn't really going to do us much good.

WordPerfect or WordStar?  Anyways, go to Vetusware.  Amazing collection of abandonware.

Need an OS to run that old software?  Same site.

Not sure where all that stands as far as legality, but I believe you are allowed to have copies of things for archival purposes, correct?  Gray area, anyways, so be aware of that.