 Hey guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. I thought I'd just finish off these videos about Mdisk for backup purposes. I've talked about the Mdisk. I interviewed the Mdisk guy inventor last week. It's a very interesting form of storage medium. It's an optical storage medium intended specifically as opposed to, you know, DVDs for long-term archival use. It's available as a DVD and a Blu-ray. These days I'd imagine everybody's using it on Blu-ray because it does more capacity. Currently available in 2550 and 100 gigabyte Blu-ray discs and you need a Mdisk capable burner to write to it because it's got a very unique process of burning data into really etching it into an inorganic layer versus a conventional Blu-ray burning. And if you're curious about all these details, check out my interview with Barry Lunt, Professor Barry Lunt from Brigham, and that's on this YouTube channel. I'll put a link in the description. Now I've talked in my backup videos about 321 backup and, you know, in the ideal thing, it's not just enough to have a local backup, however great it is to have a local backup. You want to have it somewhere offside too. So you've got two options regarding Mdisk. One is let's say you're doing what I'm doing. I'm backing up YouTube videos 25 gigs at a time. You can backup, you can write, burn a zip archive, which is the way I'm doing it, to one disc, and then you just burn it to another disc. And most backup software like Burn, I can't remember the name of the one I'm using. They have an option for this. It's like you create one and it says you want to write another disc with the same data. Or you can just start the process again and if you're, let's say you've a archive called archive.zip, you can just add that again, pop a new disc into your Blu-ray Mdisk burner and go ahead and do that. Now that's fine, it does work. It's a little bit labor intensive. So because of the fact that these things are used for storage, so frequently there is a class of product called duplicators. Now this isn't just for Mdisk. It exists for DVDs, for Blu-rays. And given that the optical storage media market in a whole is kind of in decline as storage moves to the cloud and to hard drive. And I've talked about why that is definitely, the cloud is wonderful, but it's not necessarily the best storage medium, especially for cold archival. So these websites, you will perhaps notice, all have a little bit of an old school look to them. And that's probably for that reason. But they do exist, these products. And just to give you an example, there's this website I'm on called duplicators for all, for all your duplication needs. And like take a look at this beast. It's a one to seven burner Blu-ray, CVD, DVD, duplicator. I don't know who'd be buying these things if it's backup, or if it's like just in the pre Torrent days, this is how pirates would burn a bunch of copies. Let's just assume it's for legitimate use. So these are the type of places where you will find it. Now in my case, for simple offsite backup, I don't need a seven disk duplicator, I just need one more copy, right? So ideally, I'd like to pop in one M disk and say duplicate that. And then I can mark up the new disk as offsite backup. And as I said, do physical offsite, which can be sending it to a friend, storing it in some other offsite location. So I actually had trouble. This website was like almost overkill for my needs. Blu-ray M disk duplicator, right in this product category. Oh no, we have one. Sorry, I stand corrected. So let me show you just a few of the products and give you an idea for how much they cost. The problem with enterprise tech, you'll find, for instance, stuff like this, is that it's very expensive. It's priced for enterprises. So you can see this guy is 535 pounds sterling. It looks very, very old school. I would not be surprised if this isn't supported for that much longer, but it is M disk capable. You can see the M disk logo here. And it's listed in the product as an M disk tower. And they give you info about the M disk, which I'm not going to repeat because of the fact that I've talked about M disks plenty over the last few videos. So this is one source. It's pricey. If money isn't an object, you can buy one of these and just burn your M disk and then copy it over. And you can do, the advantage of these is you can do offline copy, right? So you don't need a computer. You can just stick in one CD, stick in a second CD or M disk, and then push a button that says copy. And if they've got the same capacity, i.e. you have enough room, it'll just copy source to target. So these exist for hard drives as well, but they also exist for optical media. Now, if it literally would be cheaper, and this is probably what I'm going to do because I don't have 500 pounds to spend on this pet project, I'm just going to probably be using my burning software and burning one disk and then just manually burning a second copy. Or you could even buy two M disk burners and a burn for free has a feature for actually that. It'll say you've got your source in the first Blu-ray burner and you've got your target in the second. And I'll do a source to target. Now, given that the Blu-ray burner has only cost about $100, the M disk ones, again, $100 extra is cheaper than $500, 500 pounds extra, which is more like $700. You can probably find a little bit cheaper on Amazon M disk duplicator if I search for these. And the lingo you want to use is one to one. You can see there's one to five. And if you fish around, you'll probably find, so this one where we've actually come down, considering price, this one is $219. And it does have M disk support. And by the way, you can use a one to five as one to one, right? You don't have to, it's just the capacity that's there. But you'd imagine that the less the smaller machines would be cheaper. So $200 isn't extraordinary. It's a one to three in this case. So you could have your source here and three targets. So that would be really intense backup, not useful for most people. Here we go. Here's a one to one machine. This guy is $270 on Amazon. Unfortunately, so I have my address set to a US address. And that's, that is intentional, but it means that these are 110 volt products. So if you're based in a non US geography like me that runs on to 20 volts, it may be a little bit trickier to find a one to one that isn't crazy expensive like this $500 machine, and which will also work on your voltage unless, you know, if you don't want to use a transformer. So I don't think this guy is dual voltage. But that's just another factor to be aware of. It would be cheaper to buy these things on Amazon US, but then you're going to run into voltage problems. So that's what's out there on the market for M disk duplication currently. Again, I hope this product class doesn't become obsolete. If I can find one that's relatively cheap, I'm probably going to buy one in the next year for this reason, like before they go off the market or like get one up. But you know, storage actually doesn't move as quite as quickly as you think. And there are people I know using M disk for archival. So I'd imagine this, this technology is not actually in as much risk of obsolescence as may initially seen the case. I hope that video was useful for fellow data archiving and M disk fans, just a quick tour of what's on the market there and the economics in buying that year. And until the next video.