M-Discs are certainly interesting. What’s complicated is that the company that invented M-Discs, Millenniata, went bankrupt, and that has sort of introduced a cloud of uncertainty over the technology.
There is a manufacturer, Verbatim, with the license to manufacture discs using the M-Disc standard and the M-Disc branding. Some customers have accused Verbatim of selling regular discs with the M-Disc branding at a huge markup and this accusation could be completely wrong and baseless — Verbatim has denied it — but it’s sort of hard to verify what’s going on anymore.
If Millenniata were still around, they would be able to tell us for sure whether Verbatim is still complying properly with the M-Disc standard and whether we can rely on their discs. I don’t understand the nuances of optical disc storage well enough to really know what’s going on. I would love to see some independent third-party who has expertise in this area and who is reputable and trustworthy tell us whether the accusations against Verbatim are really just a big misunderstanding.
Millenniata’s bankruptcy is an example of the unfortunate economics of archival storage media. Rather than pay more for special long-lasting media, it’s far more cost-effective to use regular, short-term storage media — today, almost entirely hard drives — and periodically copy over the data to new media. This means the market for archival media is small.
As for how many physical locations digital data is kept in, that depends on what it is. The CLOCKSS academic archive keeps digital copies of 61.4 million academic papers and 550,000 books in 12 distinct physical locations. I don’t know how Wikipedia does its backups, mirroring, or archiving internally, but every month an updated copy of the English Wikipedia is released that anyone can download. Given Wikipedia’s openness, it is unusually well-replicated across physical locations, just considering the number of people who download copies.
I also don’t know how the EA Forum manages its backups or archiving internally, but a copy of posts can be saved using the Wayback Machine, which will create at least 2 additional physical copies on the Internet Archive’s servers. I don’t know what Google does with YouTube videos. I think for Google Drive data they keep enough data to recover files in at least two physically separate datacentres, but those could be two datacentres in the same region. I also don’t know if they do the same for YouTube data — I hope so.
I think in the event of a global catastrophe like a nuclear war, what we should think about is not whether the data would physically survive somewhere on a hard drive, but, more practically, whether it would ever actually be recovered. If society is in ruins, then it doesn’t really matter if the data physically survives somewhere unless it can be accessed and continually copied over so that it’s preserved. Since hard drives last for such a short time, the window of time for society to recover enough to find, access, and copy the data from hard drives is quite narrow.
I don’t know if you were asking about paper books or ebooks, but for paper books, it seems clear that for any book on the New York Times bestseller list, there must be at least one copy of that book in many different libraries, bookstores, and homes in many locations. I don’t know how to think about the probability of copies ending up in Argentina, Iceland, or New Zealand, but it seems like at least a lot of English bestsellers must end up in various libraries, stores, and homes in New Zealand.
Paper books printed on acid-free paper with a 2% alkaline reserve, which, as far as I understand, is the standard for paper books printed over the last 20 years or so, are expected to last over 100 years provided they are kept in reasonably cool, dry, and dark conditions. I’m not sure how exactly the longevity would be estimated to change for books kept in a tropical climate vs. a temperate one. The 2% alkaline reserve on the paper is so that as the natural acid in the cellulose in the paper is slowly released over time, the alkaline counteracts it and keeps the paper neutral. Paper is really such a fascinating technology and more miraculous than we give it credit for.
Vinyl records are more important for preserving culture — specifically music — rather than knowledge or information, but it’s interesting that vinyl sales are so high and that vinyl would probably end up being the most important technology for the preservation of music in some sort of global disaster scenario. In 2024, the top ten bestselling albums on vinyl in the U.S. sold between 175,000 copies (for Olivia Rodrigo at #10) and 1,489,000 copies (for Taylor Swift at #1). The principle here is the same as for paper books. You have to imagine these records are spread out all over the United States. Given that both vinyl records and many of the same musicians are popular in other countries like Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, it seems likely there are many copies elsewhere in the world too.
Since looking into this topic, I have warmed considerably on vinyl. I didn’t really get the vinyl trend before. I guess I still don’t, really, but now I think vinyl is a wonderful thing, even if the reasons people are buying it are not that it makes the preservation of music more resilient to a global disaster.
I didn’t need any convincing to be fond of paper books, but paper just seems more and more impressive the more I think about it.
Interesting, thanks! I might actually sign up for the Arctic Archive thing! I don’t see you mention m-discs like this—any reason for that?
Also, do you have any takes on how many physical locations a typical X is stored in, for various X?
X could be:
A wikipedia page
An EA Forum post
A YouTube video
A book that’s sold 100/1k/10k/100k/1M copies
Etc
M-Discs are certainly interesting. What’s complicated is that the company that invented M-Discs, Millenniata, went bankrupt, and that has sort of introduced a cloud of uncertainty over the technology.
There is a manufacturer, Verbatim, with the license to manufacture discs using the M-Disc standard and the M-Disc branding. Some customers have accused Verbatim of selling regular discs with the M-Disc branding at a huge markup and this accusation could be completely wrong and baseless — Verbatim has denied it — but it’s sort of hard to verify what’s going on anymore.
If Millenniata were still around, they would be able to tell us for sure whether Verbatim is still complying properly with the M-Disc standard and whether we can rely on their discs. I don’t understand the nuances of optical disc storage well enough to really know what’s going on. I would love to see some independent third-party who has expertise in this area and who is reputable and trustworthy tell us whether the accusations against Verbatim are really just a big misunderstanding.
Millenniata’s bankruptcy is an example of the unfortunate economics of archival storage media. Rather than pay more for special long-lasting media, it’s far more cost-effective to use regular, short-term storage media — today, almost entirely hard drives — and periodically copy over the data to new media. This means the market for archival media is small.
As for how many physical locations digital data is kept in, that depends on what it is. The CLOCKSS academic archive keeps digital copies of 61.4 million academic papers and 550,000 books in 12 distinct physical locations. I don’t know how Wikipedia does its backups, mirroring, or archiving internally, but every month an updated copy of the English Wikipedia is released that anyone can download. Given Wikipedia’s openness, it is unusually well-replicated across physical locations, just considering the number of people who download copies.
I also don’t know how the EA Forum manages its backups or archiving internally, but a copy of posts can be saved using the Wayback Machine, which will create at least 2 additional physical copies on the Internet Archive’s servers. I don’t know what Google does with YouTube videos. I think for Google Drive data they keep enough data to recover files in at least two physically separate datacentres, but those could be two datacentres in the same region. I also don’t know if they do the same for YouTube data — I hope so.
I think in the event of a global catastrophe like a nuclear war, what we should think about is not whether the data would physically survive somewhere on a hard drive, but, more practically, whether it would ever actually be recovered. If society is in ruins, then it doesn’t really matter if the data physically survives somewhere unless it can be accessed and continually copied over so that it’s preserved. Since hard drives last for such a short time, the window of time for society to recover enough to find, access, and copy the data from hard drives is quite narrow.
I don’t know if you were asking about paper books or ebooks, but for paper books, it seems clear that for any book on the New York Times bestseller list, there must be at least one copy of that book in many different libraries, bookstores, and homes in many locations. I don’t know how to think about the probability of copies ending up in Argentina, Iceland, or New Zealand, but it seems like at least a lot of English bestsellers must end up in various libraries, stores, and homes in New Zealand.
Paper books printed on acid-free paper with a 2% alkaline reserve, which, as far as I understand, is the standard for paper books printed over the last 20 years or so, are expected to last over 100 years provided they are kept in reasonably cool, dry, and dark conditions. I’m not sure how exactly the longevity would be estimated to change for books kept in a tropical climate vs. a temperate one. The 2% alkaline reserve on the paper is so that as the natural acid in the cellulose in the paper is slowly released over time, the alkaline counteracts it and keeps the paper neutral. Paper is really such a fascinating technology and more miraculous than we give it credit for.
Vinyl records are more important for preserving culture — specifically music — rather than knowledge or information, but it’s interesting that vinyl sales are so high and that vinyl would probably end up being the most important technology for the preservation of music in some sort of global disaster scenario. In 2024, the top ten bestselling albums on vinyl in the U.S. sold between 175,000 copies (for Olivia Rodrigo at #10) and 1,489,000 copies (for Taylor Swift at #1). The principle here is the same as for paper books. You have to imagine these records are spread out all over the United States. Given that both vinyl records and many of the same musicians are popular in other countries like Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, it seems likely there are many copies elsewhere in the world too.
Since looking into this topic, I have warmed considerably on vinyl. I didn’t really get the vinyl trend before. I guess I still don’t, really, but now I think vinyl is a wonderful thing, even if the reasons people are buying it are not that it makes the preservation of music more resilient to a global disaster.
I didn’t need any convincing to be fond of paper books, but paper just seems more and more impressive the more I think about it.