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.

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.

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.

I would not in a thousand years have guessed greek mythology reference, lol

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.

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.

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.

? Did not know that. I assumed they were essentially WORMs but otherwise identical. Do they not use the same laser or something like that?

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.

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.

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.