 Hi guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosal here. Short notice surprise interview today with Professor Barry Lunt who's based out of Provo, Utah at Brigham Young University Barry is an expert in computer storage and is dedicated. I think Barry write most of your career all your career to to this fascinating field I came across Barry as one of the key Participants in the M disc revolution. I've done a couple of videos this week about the M disc It's a archival grade storage medium. That's a modified version of the blu-ray and DVD intended for long-term storage I've spent the best part of today burning M disc. So it's very fitting that we're talking today, Barry So I'd love to hear a little bit about this this M disc project because it has a cult following on Reddit but Outside of the mainstream, how many people are out there using M disc for archival storage at the moment? Well, that's definitely a good question. Unfortunately, I don't have a good answer for that I'm no longer involved in the company or the sales of the product And so I don't really have an insight into what kind of market it's reaching something I've you know, I had this thought earlier in the week about Storage that is kind of fascinating that I mean if you look at where we've gone in the last 10 or 20 years in terms of Going from floppy disk that could hold about one megabyte to You know, I've seen there's one terabyte micro SD's on the market and the hard drive market now goes all the way up to 20 terabytes So how is it exactly? that we've evolved so quickly in this respect in terms of making storage more compact and yet when it comes to this Subject of data and bit rot which I think that probably most casual computer users aren't even aware is the thing It seems to be M disc is the only project. That's really kind of tackle this directly. Why why why why is there such a discrepancy? That's a very good question and It's a question that I myself wondered back when I first started working on this area of research I think the simplest answer is that most people care about storing more and more of their data They they want to be able to store everything that they create and never have to worry about deleting anything And so the pressure for sales has been to create denser storage media Rather than something that will last forever because both people don't worry about that and the cloud has certainly diverted our attention away from Permanence because the cloud tells us it will be there forever where most people don't worry about The length of the storage they just want it to be there for when they next the next time they need it You know the the thing about the cloud that you know the the adage among backup people is that the cloud Isn't backup, but certainly it seems to me as if m discs could be used in a modern backup approach that may be the onsite The onsite backup is on M disc and then they're using cloud for off-site So is that a is that a use case that that people are doing out there? The M disc can certainly be used for backup purposes as well as local storage There's no nothing that prohibits it from servicing both communities. However, the M disc Was designed as DVD, which is a capacity of 4.7 gigabytes, which back in 2008 was a substantial amount of storage That's when we came up with this We followed on with the Blu-ray, which is 25 gigabytes We have not been able to Increase the capacity of the discs and we would prefer that they store a terabyte So they haven't become a mass storage device simply because it can't increase the density for reasons I don't know that we want to get into So they work well for local storage because people's storage needs are relatively small But compared to an enterprise needing to store terabytes The capacity is just not there for optical discs regarding, you know verbatim and these other manufacturers. So are they How does it work exactly because Milaniata is no longer in business, right? So these guys have the trade secret or you know, how does it work exactly that other manufacturers are manufacturing M disc nowadays? The arrangements were made before Milaniata went out of business for verbatim to license the technology and therefore Manufacture the M disc under license from Milaniata So although the company is no longer operating the license remains in effect. So yes verbatim is a licensed manufacturer of the M disc Inorganic layer. Can you just try explaining for those who haven't heard of M disc? What is it that makes M discs different than your average DVD or Blu-ray? Yeah, that's another very good question one that I was asked many many times back in the day So recordable optical discs are quite different than the ones that you buy in the store Let's see that I buy a CD or a DVD or a blu-ray disc in the store that has content on it Such as a movie or a concert or something like that When I buy that disc it is made by a very different manufacturing process In terms of the materials that are used as compared to recordable optical discs So if I buy it in the store already has a content on it. I cannot change that account overwrite it It's immutable and actually those discs will last a very long time The estimated lifetime on that based on some studies by the Library of Congress is over a thousand years Well, that's wonderful. That means that we we know how to make something that lasts a long time We just don't know how to make a recordable So if I wanted to record something by that process for my own personal use I would have to buy a million dollar machine. So that's not practical So I buy an optical optical recordable disc and the poster that I sent you has at the bottom of it a Confocal microscope image and a scanning electron microscope image of a recordable optical disc On the left side, you can see the marks you can see the ones in the zeros on the right side You see no marks You just see the trenches or tracks as we call them of the optical disc and you can't see the physical data So the point of that picture is that when and a recordable disc is recorded it the laser Impinges on the die that is in each of the tracks and causes that die to be less Reflecting so you see the dark spots and you see the light spots in the image there And so those are the ones in zeros and that's been changed by the laser of the optical disc recorded but those those Images are made or excuse me those marks are made in a die that is organic And of course it has to be a light sensitive die Which means if you store these discs in the light the light itself will cause further degradation So when you need something that's that's not light sensitive Then there's also not changed by temperature and humidity On the image of the poster that I sent you on the right is a scanning electron microscope picture of the M Disc and you can see the dramatic difference you can see or clearly see the ones in zeros So what we've done with the laser is we've ablated the recording layer. It's no longer an organic diets in organic Which means it's not subject to further degradation by environmental issues such as temperature humidity and light and And of course, you know from that your reading that we've done tests of that We the Naval Weapons Research Center in China Lake, California did tests on our M disc compared to the very best recordable optical discs using accelerated aging including light temperature and humidity and our discs came out unscathed literally unscathed Where all the others came out either dead or the number of errors that went up exponentially and they were almost Unrecoverable so that you have the difference is the recording layer the material that's used to absorb the laser light And the way that the laser light changes the recording layer so in our disc those changes are physical and Permanent irreversible and I you know I saw a video on the millennia to page that you were on a hike and you saw Hieroglyphics carved into stone. Can you just tell me about that and how that provided inspiration for this means of writing data? That's a wonderful story Yeah, I was Not too far from where Provo, Utah is is a place called nine mile canyon It's I guess it's about an hour and 45 minutes away and when in 1996 I had a chance to take a group of 16 and 17 year old youth To that canyon for a couple of overnight campouts and one of the features that drew us to that canyon where higher glyphs Excuse me not hardest petroglyphs petroglyphs by the way means marks made on rock Petros rocks by the Indians the Anasazi Indians that were there Two three thousand years ago We don't know for sure how far freemont Anasazi or freemont Indians And so the first time I ever walked up to one of those and got to see it and touch it You can see that what the what the marks are is that the rock face has been aged by the sun and the weather over millennia and Darkened and if you chip away a thin layer about a millimeter thick is all of that dark layer You expose a light layer of rock So when you look at the petroglyph you can see that it's made by a chipping process where you remove the dark layer and expose A light layer and my mind immediately thought oh, that's just like optical disc That's how we record data on optical distance an optical contrast light spot and the dark spot and I thought oh You could do that with lasers and and I didn't think anything of it until 2005 When I was making a backup copy of my Digital pictures because I finally had a digital camera and I thought these pictures are precious to me I want to make a copy of them and I realized well I can't Copying it from a hard disk drive to another hard disk drive is kind of like Taking something that's in a glass bottom leaky bowed and putting it in another glass bottom leaky boat Meaning if the boat hits a rock it's going to break and fall apart and crash and so everything's lost And it leaks so that eventually the boat is going to sink because it's leaking and thought well Okay, that hard disk drive is rather Not a very good way to do that and I realized that optical recording discs Of course, we're not permanent as well and then I knew that we've about had flash drives But I knew that flash drives weren't permanent and that's it magnetic optical and Solid state or flash drives. Those are the only three technologies we have and none of them were permanent and so I thought few This probably matters to other people too They want some permanent way to store their digital data And that's what got us involved in starting the research and later the company millennia Could you tell a little bit about what mdiscs are being used for nowadays? Who's buying these things would it be sort of governmental archivist? What are the typical use cases nowadays for mdisc storage? Yeah, so my understanding is that the typical use case now is backing up data for Long-term storage or what we call offline storage Sometimes called cold storage Meaning that it's data that does not need to be regularly accessed Which is the typical use case for individuals for non Commercial entities. So if you or I for instance want to store Something that we want to pass on to our grandchildren or great grandchildren or further generations beyond that Before computers we would do that simply by writing it down in ink Income paper will last thousands of hundreds of years if not thousands of years So that's a permanent way to pass that kind of stuff on But up or excuse me digital data is quite different than that and none of the technologies until the mdisc We're capable of storing it for hundreds or thousands of years So the typical use case is that you and I could record whatever we wish on the mdisc Put it in an attic die And then when our great grandchildren find about find it assuming they have a drive that will read it still in those days The data will still be there and that's the only use case that That we envisioned at the time, but it certainly found some adoption in commercial enterprises as well So barry, are you aware of other projects that are kind of like the mdisc? We're talking cold storage For long term Archival use or is mdisc the only project of this nature? Yeah, so we envisioned two other different markets Products rather one was what we call solid state storage And the second the other one was magnetic tape storage, but not magnetic, but it would be optical tape So what we were doing was looking for ways to take the kinds of storage media that we have today and make them permanent We did not find any way to make a hard disk drive permanent because of the ways that hard disk drives fail Their their technologies are like a glass bottom boat They they leak a bit and they are very prone to catastrophic failure And that's a mechanical issue and we were not able to resolve that But we did come up with permanent solid-stage storage. We have some patents on that And that means that we take transistors as we have in integrated circuits and we Take a fuse and we're all familiar with fuses. You know that a fuse that that is intact will conduct electricity And a blown fuse will not conduct electricity. Well, that's what we call contrasting states or An intact fuse and a destroyed fuse so we can call those ones and zeros and make those into bits And the good news is that we can make those fuses extremely tiny And therefore put millions or even billions of those fuses on an integrated circuit And that would become what we call a flash drive today flash drives are not permanent They are non-volatile, but they do not last more than about 10 years But on our envisioned product The fuses would be blown and that would be a physical change that is irreversible And that would last for well over a thousand years And we have patents on that as I've mentioned and that has been developed into a commercial product Although it is not yet completely available because the entity that has developed this Is using it for their proprietary purposes and they've not released it for the market yet So that's the solid state storage And product that we've envisioned the other one as I mentioned is optical tape And we have not developed that one at all the envisioned technology Back in 19, excuse me in 2008 would have given us a storage capacity of about one terabyte on an optical disc excuse me an optical tape cartridge like the lto tapes that are used for backups in magnetic storage today But that one terabyte we don't see a way to increase that capacity Where magnetic tapes continue to increase their capacity. So we've not developed the optical tape idea yet So, Barry there, you know when when I when I tell my friends about my adventures in backup and mdesk People will look at me like I've two heads and say have you not heard of the cloud? um, so how would you respond to those who argue that you know with stuff like The ability to easily put up copies of data into aws and back plays that there is no need for Permanent storage media anymore because you know the cloud has got a crazier redundancy What would your response be to that? No doubt that the cloud is a very very good solution in all commercial cases by commercial I mean Let's say if I have a company as long as the company is in business my company will be paying Money to aws or any other cloud provider to keep my data But as soon as my company goes out of business aws is not in the business of being uh What is it philanthropic and giving away storage and maintaining storage for someone who doesn't pay for So as soon as my company goes out of business and stops paying Whatever cloud service provider they were paying that data is no longer guaranteed to be there Well, that's certainly the case for us as individuals if I die I'm not going to have some kind of provision in my estate probably to in perpetuity pay the cloud provider to store my data It's just going to be gone. They they don't do it just because they love us They do it because you pay pay for it. So the cloud is a paid storage solution. They are not a free storage solution Uh barry, let me just say thank you very much for taking time on behalf of all M disc fans out there For doing this interview. It's been very illuminating to understand a bit more about the technology The need for us and where things might be evolving. Thank you. Daniel. It's been great to visit with you