 Hey guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosal here and guess what today's video is about That's right It's gonna be about the end disc again because I've just finished burning my Offsite archive of the M disc. I did look at this beauty. This is a Binder full of M discs starting from my first video my first First folder full of stock video footage b-roll wedding photos are in here somewhere It's about 18 discs and believe it or not this actually constitutes pretty much everything you're seeing on this YouTube channel plus some more Not all my YouTube videos are public. So there's some ones where I'm just like testing at microphones I put everything on M disc and that was firstly a massive labor of love Then I did another labor of love because I realized three two one backup. You got to have an off-site So I've been duplicating this sky one by one and I just finished earlier today So I've been having a lot of fun with my verbatim M discs But what I wanted to do in this video is I put together a presentation Or a slight whatever you want to call it. I want to talk about why I'm genuinely so excited about M disc I probably don't need to say that my Enthusiasm comes from a genuine place of excitement and I know it seems a bit weird for Non-dataire protection backup folks to be so excited, but I've genuinely been looking for something Like the M disc for the longest time. I assumed it didn't exist. I never heard of the M disc until about two weeks ago and I'm so happy to have found it because it's a great relief for me to have that feeling of having my stuff backed up on Some kind of media that I can control I can see it's in my house it's going to be in my relatives house and It's there is there's no maintenance. It's supposedly and again, I'm going to get into the claims about the M disc It's supposed to just sit there for 100 to 1,000 years No bit rush to worry about and it's the only kind of media that actually promises that so I think it's fascinating I actually think it's amazing tech now I get there's a lot of skeptics Especially on reddit or people like well if it says it's a hundred to 1,000 years How can you know that because it's only been on the market since 2009? So I definitely hear that argument. I did speak to the inventor of the M disc Barry Lund class week I just trust it This is technology. I trust, you know, I trust that it's a unique tech. It's patented It's a unique engraving process and realistically when you're doing something like three to one backup, you know You have two copies as well as your original data It's probably data. I'm not going to need again. It's archival of these videos It probably never will be anywhere, but YouTube, but I still want to protect it and have it my own copy for Here on after the next generation whatever you want to say. So let me get into it. Let me jump into it here So this is called why M discs are amazing tech I was gonna say in my opinion But I said I'd be a bit a bit more brash because I think this is just really a cool invention Irrespective of whether the use case is really small I still think it's easy to be hypercritical and let's just say this is a cool tech So I'm gonna put myself over here a little bit as it says on this slide show Feel free to use this slide or this video however you want all my YouTube videos Unless they unless it doesn't have it in the description our licensed under CC by NC and the 4.0 Creative comments license simple language. You can share it distribute it. Just make sure you say it was by me I do want credit for my M disc fervor and that's a quick URL if you ever want to jump to this YouTube channel Daniel Rosal.com slash YouTube will redirect over to this YouTube. So let's get into it. So What's an M disc you may ask it's a good question So what these things are basically it's a modified version of the DVD and blu-ray that's specially engineered for archival Offline storage. So when we talk about data storage and archiving there is typically two ways it can be done and One of those is storing it on a live system on a server. Let's say The cloud falls into that category the cloud as the famous saying goes is just somebody else's computer So you're just storing it on a server. Let's say you have it in glacier. It's up in Amazon's cloud Now there's a theory that that AWS glacier is actually tape No one that seems to actually know that for sure But irrespective it's in someone's cloud storage connected to computers and the internet cold storage by contrast is Also known as sitting on a shelf, right? So it's literally just taking your finished archived and discs and putting them ideally somewhere You know humidity humidity temperature control, but basically not in a computer, right? So what makes M discs unique? So it's actually in and it's a pity. I should have included probably the diagram But it's in my other M disc videos And if you do want to watch my interview as Barry Lund if you're really interested in M discs He explains all this in detail. So basically the unique thing about M discs Is that usually when you're writing to optical storage CD DVDs and blu-ray to the best of my knowledge And I wouldn't wouldn't yet consider myself a optical expert. I'm just an M disc fanatic The laser ablates a way at a die and the problem is that over time that die will degrade the die will fade So if you think about the bits and bytes of data being stored as millions of tiny ablations onto that die If the die itself fades we're gonna lose that optical contrast that is storing the data so when their laser passes over the disc That's how it reads it goes up to a it's actually pretty fascinating a reflector and that gets fed into the computer So that's how it usually works and M disc took a different approach. This guy Barry Lund went on a hike I love this story. It's this is to me partially why I love M disc is such a great origin story He went on a hike. He noticed what are called petroglyphs petroglyphs are little pictures carved into stone And he noticed that these ancient carvings were just this deep in stone not very far But that had made them much more weatherproof than painting on stone So this guy is a storage storage expert computer scientist and he was like, aha Why don't we try to make a form of optical storage using the same principle? So that's what the end disk is in between the exterior and the bottom somewhere in the middle Again, you need an electron microscope to be able to see all this stuff But somewhere in the middle between the top and the underside of the disc There is a trade secreted inorganic layer and when you're writing an M disc And this is why writing an M disc takes such a bloody long time. You're not actually a bleeding die You're actually engraving into this trade secret layer now unfortunately the company that Originated this technology millennia has gone bust. So it's verbatim who are continuing the technology But in any event so it is a trade secret and it's patent protected and look people will say oh But you know the fact that it can be read on regular blu-rays. It can't be that secret. I don't buy that You know, I think someone should probably try to reverse engineer the M disc if they really want to prove That it's not that unique. I suspect it's a really good technology And yeah, we're not probably not going to know for another century if we can still read them whether whether all the hype was justified But I'm willing to live with that at uncertainty Yeah, so I said here technically they're correct. So you're technically engraving rather than burning an M disc So here's the thing about M disc So they can be read by regular optical drives Which if you think about it makes sense, right that the burners or the engravers need to be M disc certified But you don't need M disc certified readers, right? Because the data once the data gets put on the disc It's just an irregular optical disc can be read. But to get through that process of engraving I think you need like a stronger laser So you need to if you're want to get into archiving to M disc You need to look for M disc blu-ray burners. I assuming you're using blu-ray I don't know why anyone would be using DVD in this day and age because you can just fit much more data on a blu-ray I was gonna say next slide and I realized I am the slide guy been watching too many YouTube webinars so why Let's just roll back a second, right? Why is this something that is Interesting in the first place. So there's a misconception. This is something you see people do I've even seen so many YouTube videos where people are showing their backup archive and they're like Yeah, we're a video production company and have a look at how many hard drives we filled up and they're just sitting in a box Now just because a lot of people do something doesn't mean it's actually the right way of going about something I'm trying to think of examples, but too many examples to list So if you leave hard drives, right like the hard drive here, they're not intended to Be stored cold hard drives are supposed to live in Computers right and the computer almost all operating systems nowadays has you know error-checking software And if the hard drive is about to fail, they'll say hey your hard drive is bad sectors and you know, oh crap It's about to you know, it's about to fail I need to take a backup and get a new hard drive and move the data over right So there is that mechanism when you have hard drives sitting cold on a shelf the way hard drives write data Is freaking fascinating right? It's actually using magnetization and when your hard drive said let's just pretend this hard drive here It's on the screen next to me is sitting on someone's shelf It's actually going to be Demagnetizing over time right the bits are going to flip. So if you think about magnetism North Pole South Pole Those bits are going to flip And when the bits flip it can range from the idea the outcome of that can be Skipped frames in a video or frames was a bit of distortion or in the worst case data That's totally unreasonable not only that but hard drives can Catastrophically fail because of the fact that they have a physical mechanism. So that's why hard drives however many people say Oh, yeah, we're just storing our stuff in hard drive That's why it's not a good idea to actually store your stuff on cold storage in a hard drive SSD also suffers from this problem Just not the mechanical failure aspect and tape does as well. Don't trust me trust. Mr. Backup Curtis Preston and Or trust other resources. You can look online if you don't believe me tape LTO linear tape optical does and can't suffer from bit rot So even though tape is yes what people think of for archival storage. It's not actually guaranteed to Do its job right so this this end of stuff is actually very unique It's a technology where the manufacturers say claim. Yes, I understand it to claim this will not be susceptible to degradation of any of any kind and we're going to write it in stone and that's going to last for 100 to 1000 years I have not seen any other optical storage if they're out there leave me a comment that actually claims this so as a Small timer small-time data person, right? I'm not backing up petabytes or even terabytes I'm backing up these YouTube videos this YouTube video will end up on an M disc. That's what I'm backing up, right? At my level that's unique. I'm like, oh, that's very exciting, right? So I can just back it up Two copies three two one backup one of my home one in an off-site and say hey my stuff is good Don't need to connect it to power. Don't need to check it periodically. It's good. So that's unique so Yeah, so basically that's the problem with so that that's why it is unique Yeah, now the cloud is a different different beast or an NAS network attack storage device Which is kind of the same thing you have raid random Array of independent discs and that's connected to power and I own a sonology I do have one in my house and it's got all these programs checking it for data art, right? So yeah, that's another approach a viable approach so you could do NAS plus cloud but That's a it's a powered product, right? It needs to be connected to power and if you want to expand it you have to look into Expanding it with expansion bays So it's a little bit more in a sense It's actually a good deal more complicated than the simple but effective means a backing up data by just repetitively burning discs And yeah backing up disc isn't fun. No one enjoys it including me, but Yeah, it's Quite unique so then the question becomes well, what about LTO or tape isn't that isn't tape supposed to be What isn't there already something doing archival, right? So first point against that is LTO is susceptible to bit rather data rot According to Curtis who I have a relationship with as a friend. I was on his podcast He hosts the restored all podcast. He's a backroom storage expert Curtis just says yeah, it does but it's much much less than HDD SDD Now another problem really for home consumers is that tapes really expensive not the actual tape The actual medium is much cheaper on a per gigabyte or per terabyte basis But the drives are a lot more expensive. You can get it M disc burner for like a hundred bucks Okay, and again, so this hasn't been the point I make here is that look and just say a hundred to one thousand years They've only been around since 2009 so I'm recording this video in 2022. So that's 13 years Correct me if I'm wrong So we can't even know for sure they last a hundred years because they just haven't been invented with that that long yet So what we're left with is these accelerated aging tests done by the Department of Defense and others And that's the best surrogate we have today, right? We can't teleport We can't teleport 90 years into the future in a time machine because time travel is impossible to say Oh, yeah, the M disc. Here we go We burned all these M discs. We read them back in a hundred years and the marketing was accurate No one can do that. So there's no point arguing about this We just have to either trust them or not trust them and that's a personal decision. I personally I'm on team M disc and this debate So why is tape much bigger than M disc? Well, if you think about it as optical storage has never really been suitable for the enterprise There are a few reasons for that the capacity in optical is just too small, right? These M discs get up to 100 gigs and writing to them as I mentioned is very slow Although that's actually I think a problem with LTO as well. Just to be transparent. I don't own an LTO drive I'm not an LTO guy, but I've been reading enough threads on data hoarder subreddit that I think I understand the pros and cons between these two technologies pretty well and as Barry said the M disc guy M disc optical media in general is hamstrung by Small capacity problem, right? Including the M disc There are apparently in the works super super cutting-edge developments of storing data on quartz and crystal If that tech ever materializes optic may have it optical may have a renaissance But for now the capacity just is not there now There's one more problem actually or there's one more advantage of LTO LTO is a really established tech in enterprises for archival and tech libraries are big things And you can see the graphgads here of these they have these crazy robots that'll like jump grab out a Tape from a tape library physically insane tech that exists in enterprises You can even have LTO drives that can allow you to use it as a file system I Amdus are also worm media. They are right once read many times. You eat. It's a one-go Engraving process you put your data on once so for a business doing archival and that doesn't is you know Has tons of petabytes of data to store and it's going to be powered on anyway LTO LTO makes way more sense, but that's not this M disc is intended to serve a different purpose So I don't think it's an either or situation. They're just different use cases So what is M? So basically for the kind of stuff I'm doing this is a this is brilliant, right? It's for it's for folks like me really like you know, I have I have a video or I have photos or I have a few What else do you want to put an archival? I don't know Books you can put in books. You can put in animations. You can put in You know, whatever type of data you create that you really care about you can put it on an M disc It's going to be an archive. So And the worm media as I said, so this you're not putting on to end this stuff You're going to be changing like a book you're working on right that would absolutely make zero sense Because every time you change that you need to burn a new disc. So that would be pointless So what it is again, I think for a videography work and that's I suspect why BNH actually sell the M disc. This is perfect if you're a videographer and you're you know, you routinely shooting 10 20 gigs of Stock library and you don't even need to go three to one backup. You just want to have it For retrieval maybe for your clients, right? M disc is brilliant. It's not that expensive to $2.50 a disc If you're making a living from video, especially, right? You know and again You have to think about the cost of your data storage if data is important to you Then 250 per disc for something that's supposed to last and last and you don't have to worry about it for me That is well worth paying so and this is our price here than a blue rays and people cream people curb about this on reddit, but There is you have to in my opinion look at the flip side of the process It's free thereafter that you have to buy the discs, but then it doesn't cost anything really to store a disc It's just in my binder put that in your attic or ever use space and For the offsite likewise put it in your attic review space You don't need to pay AWS or back plays or anyone for storing the end discs And again, I don't know of any other until I came across this project I didn't know of anyone that claims to be impervious to bit rather data. That's a very very exciting thing Moving on I mean we're getting near the end. I'm using so here's what I'm doing I'm personally using it to archive these YouTube videos because I actually do really care about these videos I know there I know my YouTube channel is in its early phase and I still regard these as my rookie video attempts Even though I've been at this for a few years, but yeah, I want to preserve this data I want it to be accessible. Maybe for my kids. Maybe for my grandkids I don't want it to just be on YouTube a third-party SAS provider and hope There isn't a random strike against the YouTube channel or I get hacked or some of my videos get deleted So therefore I'm preserving my original data three two one in two places I'm actually generating a decent amount of data in a small time for a lot of people But you'd be surprised the amount of data if let's say I put up one video per day Which at the moment I have been I've been actually doing quite a lot of this video stuff This video might come to 500 megs to do that every day and add the numbers up and you're suddenly the data is accumulating Right, so here's what I personally do when I finish these videos I put them on my NAS and then I wait for 25 gigs or 23 gigs because you don't get the full 25 Then I take on my end-bisk burner and I burn two copies One goes into my onsite library in the second I get Now I'm bringing it in my suitcase to my in-laws and future I might have a backup buddy where like I post my discs. He posts his discs or she posts her discs There's different ways to do physical backup and you can actually a bit of fun with it You can have a backup buddy that you meet in a bar once a month and he brings his latest Discs you bring your latest discs and now you've each got a copy of your discs in a different geographic location That's an off-site. It's just not the cloud. So disbelieve it or not is still done in enterprise tech terms This is an analogous to iron mountain So you can actually do three two one backups with just with the end disk. That's actually what I'm doing at the moment I have my original data these YouTube videos. I have my originals sitting in my home office eventually these guys will be in a pelican box for now they're in this binder and In about three weeks from now, I'll also have them sitting in somewhere in the US as my off-site So as possible, which to me is pretty damn cool What are some other advantages of the end-disk optical cold archival storage? Again, I'm going to argue that it's just not that expensive, right? So if you're doing three two and backup that means each 25 gigs is twice Copied so if you have if it's 250 a disc, that's five bucks for your two copies for 25 gigs And let's say like me you go through the month So if you're spending five dollars a month, but for lifetime Protection no cost thereafter to me. That's an absolutely worthwhile investment in data protection, especially if you're Business really even if even if you're not doing it for business just for keeping memory safe And that's at the high scale. Maybe you only burn one end disk a year So I think it's it's uh, I don't I think it's yeah the more expensive than optical because It's a special tech and it costs money to make this engraving layer. I presume It's green as a new be environmentalists. I'm currently working I've made a slight career transition recently. I've historically worked in tech and now I'm actually working in For a sustainable sustainability an individual Involved in financial sustainability So I'm becoming more conscious of this stuff and actually m discs my opinion are a green cause, right? Think about how much there's a figure about how much of the world's power consumption Goes to data centers data centers have to have power fed into them. They need a lot of cooling They need a lot of electricity And some of that data does not need to be accessed. It's just there is a failsafe for archival like my video backups, right? So all that power all that data if it were stored on m disc Or even lto but let's say m disc never have to check it again. There's potentially actually a huge Power saving here. So I would argue that the m disc is a green form of storage Because it's just one one time burn and then no electricity cost required to have it sitting on your shelf um So, yeah, green people buy m discs. How do you write to your m discs? So, um, I've had no trouble using k3b on a bunch To there's also serve as services for programs for windows and mac You do need to make sure you have an m disc capable burner. So not anyone will do Um now m disc burning is a is slow. It's a it's a slow process and I presume that's got to do with the engraving I was burning them at one time. So If I look a bit demented right now or have a crazy think about what I've been doing guys I literally burned these there's 18 discs one by one by one by one So that was 18 hours. By the way, I was doing work as this was going on But I spent yesterday as I was working Feeding discs in and out of my m disc burner and then I did the whole thing again for my off site So it's a lot of work But that was because I was doing five years of m disking previously If you are doing it once per month, it's going to be much easier, right? That's the way to do it at the end of each month Set yourself a google calendar appointment for the 31st Burn your month's data onto m disc two times one onsite post one off site. Boom. You're done. So Yeah, if you're doing five years retrospectively, it's a lot of work, but Data protection is worth it. I would argue. Um So, yeah, uh, don't do it the way I did it do it ongoing Where can you get these things? So, uh, not actually that hard now. I live in fear I live in fear right now That the m disc is going to go out of business. I really hope it isn't so That's my ulterior motive in these videos. I'm not sure. I don't have shares in m disc I'm just hoping they keep making these things because uh, I don't see a replacement for it So this is how much they cost 65 bucks on amazon for a 25 spindle And burners are about 100 bucks. So Not bad. Again compared to lto. This is a ton cheaper, right lto drives cost thousands of dollars So, yeah, you can get started with if you watch this video and say I love it I'm in I want to start burning m disc. You can get going for about 100 bucks Uh burner plus m disc you'll get these combo things on amazon By the way, they also exist these duplicators. Um, so what these are useful for is it's these work offline So you don't need a computer so you can burn your one m disc And I haven't found double m disc drives that like they'll burn two at the same time So you could try to use two external drives Or You can use these duplicator folks duplicator yokes And that that means the what you do here is you burn your first m disc And then you just feed it into this machine and it will copy It'll copy these are all these can work without a computer. Now. Look at the price tag 250 bucks It's actually cheaper to buy a second and just burner and burn two copies at the same time But this is more convenient arguably especially if you're doing like what I did for the last Day or two and you're literally one by one by one feeding reading copying feeding reading copying That's what he's doing feeding my first copies Dialoting the ones at the computer about a 30 minute per disc then burning them about an hour per disc Very very slow. So this something like this would really speed up the process I can't find one with 220 volts power if I did I would probably buy one. I have to be honest Why not if you're taking this seriously and these these things unfortunately, I reckon are going to go off the market So if you can get one, I personally would snap one up before they stop making them because Eventually we're realistically all on the path towards obsolescence Here's some photos for you guys of m disc madness and progress. Here's me using k3b on a bunch of linux to burn an m disc As I said, it's a slow process. I was getting 1.4 times speed And it you can see remaining time here 51 minutes. Nothing about this was fast But yeah, I just you know get it running And then just go and do other things While your m discs are burning away Here is what my couch looked like yesterday while I was in the process of copying m discs from my on-site to my off-site folders Now here is a point of debate I posted a video on permanent marker on labeling your m discs and then a commenter on this youtube channel said don't label them because You could throw off the balance of the m discs and then because I thought I was being smart by not using Permanent marker although these ones have these are like my first I'm just kind of trying everything at the moment Then some people say permanent marker can seep down into the data and destroy it So then people say well use permanent markers That are cd rated won't be a problem Everyone agrees that writing here where my mouse is where there's no data stores Is safe So what I would do is get a cd permanent marker and just write you can see I'm using a 0 0 3 So I would write here on this area a 0 0 3 And not if you're really worried and not too labeling, but I haven't had problems reading back ones I've labeled Just with the label printer I haven't had problems writing to them with the label on them. So I'm not sure if it's really an issue These are we're probably getting into my new c a here and then people also say, you know, don't store them in binders because you're going to get compression effect I've worried a lot about this stuff and I'm at the point where I feel like these things I'm not personally worried about some people are you can make up your own mind about that So yeah, as I said here, this is the way I'm doing it I just got a folder from amazon and I'm slotting in the discs And I'm labeling them and you'll see why in a second But if you want to do it as well as possible dual cases, they are probably the safest way because Each disc is physically isolated and this is just my labeling system. You see the discs have a name like a 0 0 1 So I'm just keeping a spreadsheet where I say, uh, you know Uh at the top of my slideshow is cropped a bit but whatever. Um, I'm keeping a So I just write down and this is just a placeholder I'm going to be a bit more descriptive saying my youtube videos from june my youtube videos and that's a 0 0 7 And then for my offsite, I'm labeling them a 0 0 7 copy, right? I think that should be enough in terms of process Out at the end of the presentation So I hope that was useful. I'm going to be a bit brave and call this everything you need to know about m discs Given that that's probably slightly false advertising. There probably is more You need to know I'm going to say everything everything you might want to know about the m disc because Uh, there is undoubtedly more knowledge about these although it's pretty obscure tech and um There's not a ton on even a lot of threads on reddit that are interested guessing a lot of guesswork going on when will these be supported as a really blah blah blah But this is about as much as I'm aware that there is kind of like known in the public domain So if you're thinking about using these m discs for archival Storage I do personally so far highly recommend them. It's been actually in a weird way kind of therapeutic To go back to those optical days where you know, the burner makes that lovely Kind of startup sound like an airplane And all in all given that I was retrospectively backing up for years A video and that I've done it two times for a 3d one backup Yeah, it took me about a day while I was working But it wasn't like that bad and again if you do this once per month on an ongoing basis It's going to be much easier. So there you go guys. That's that's it. Wow I'm just going to cut out on exactly under 30 minutes if I stop speaking in 10 seconds So thank you guys for watching this video If you want to get more videos from me about tech m discs linux and all the other random topics I cover on this youtube channel, please feel free to hit the subscribe button and thank you for watching