 Hey guys, very good day to you. Welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosel here bringing again another wacky video about a wacky technology, the Mdisk, one of the most fascinating technologies I've stumbled upon thanks to the wonderful power of the internet. And actually, I think it was the data hoarder subreddit where I first ran across mention of the Mdisk. So I was very excited. I was doing my errands today, picking up posts and stuff like that. And I went on to Stitcher, which is what I used to listen to podcasts. And I saw that the wonderful Restored All podcast by my digital buddies, Curtis Preston, aka Mr. Backup, and his wonderful co-host Prasanna Malayandi, who I sometimes have good chats with over on Twitter. I saw that they got Barry Lunt, who I interviewed for this YouTube channel, onto the Restored All podcast talking about the Mdisk. And as I said to Curtis and Prasanna on Twitter, my day has just taken a turn for the better because any day where more people hear about the Mdisk is a good day, in my opinion. So I have been doing a series of videos about this fascinating form of storage media, optical storage media, for the past couple of months. And what I thought I would do today in honor of this podcast, in honor of just buying another spindle of Mdisk, because I am committed to the Mdisk for the long run. I wanted to put together a little guide for anyone who's listened to the two episodes on the Restored All podcast. And they're interested, well, that sounds great. How do I start with Mdisk? Now I've been doing Mdisk back, well, archiving actually for the past four months. And I now use it for basically all the data that I care about. I keep a couple of backups of websites and stuff like that on my NAS, my writing is already pretty well backed up. And the focus for me for the past year has been this YouTube channel. And perhaps going forward, I might give my podcast a bit more effort. But all that stuff, the data I care about now, it's all going on to Mdisk. I'm 100% bought into it. And I'm here today to share some of the nuts and bolts with anyone else interested in joining the quietest peaceful Mdisk revolution. All right, guys, so here's a little Google deck I put together here. And I call it the optical approach. A quick guide to getting started, backing up your data onto Mdisk. All right, let's go. Now, the first thing you want to know, if you're thinking about using Mdisk is you want to be clear on what it is, what it does, what it's not suitable for. So it's for archival and folks tend to use backup and archive interchangeably. They're not the same thing. Let's say you have a computer system that's updating constantly like your desktop computer, and you want to have a copy so that if it goes kaput overnight, you're going to be able to restore. That's a backup use case and Mdisk would absolutely not be suitable for that. The reason is that Mdisk is what's called worm media, which stands for write once, I think read many yellow makes sense, write, write the thing once you can read it many times, right? You can only write the thing once you get one shot at burning the desk, but you can read it as many times as you want. So because Mdisk is worm media, it's not really a good choice for backup, but for archive, it's perfect. Think about my YouTube videos, right? Are you YouTube videos? If you have a YouTube channel, I put my videos up on YouTube. I don't think I'm ever going to need the original files. I don't think I hope YouTube will never get my channel off the internet, but because YouTube is a third party, I don't want to have my only copy of these videos I put time and effort to in YouTube's hands, right? So I want to keep my own copies. So that's what I'm using Mdisk for. I'm keeping two copies of every video and we'll get to the onsite offsite thing in a little bit. So I think the second caveat or the second thing it's not good for would be people who need big data. So optical media, the traditional problem of optical, I'm just going to jump out of my screen for a sec, is that it's not good for high capacity data requirements, right? The biggest Mdisk, Mdisk currently comes in three flavors and there's two variants. There's DVD Mdisk and Blu-ray Mdisk. And within the Blu-ray category, you've got 2550 and 100 gigabyte Mdisk. Now if you're a Dell or an IBM or even a national bank generating terabytes of data a day that even if you do need that to be archived as opposed to storing some backup repository, Mdisk just doesn't have the capacity. It's going to be infuriating. On the other hand, if you are a wedding photographer or a little videographer like me and you're generating maybe 20 gigs a month, Mdisk is just fine, right? So it really, really varies. It's not something I don't think you'd see many businesses using. Although if you're backing up something pretty light like office documents, you can still cram a lot of them into 25 gigs or 100 gigs. So bad use cases, I would say enterprises or backup rather than archive. Again, because the Mdisk is worm media and you can only write the thing once, you can't do incremental or differential backups in which you only write the files that have changed. So it wouldn't be really suitable for your backup use case. Who is Mdisk a grace fit for? On the other hand, I would suggest videographers, photographers, if you don't want to use a cloud, you're a videographer. It's not my reason for not using the cloud. Although I think it's a pretty decent one. You want to actually physically have access to your offsite backup. And that is a key principle of backup. The three to one rule, you want to have your two offsite copies and not just one, lest your house be broken into or be burned, God forbid, or something else on towards happen to your onsite backup. That's why you want to people who don't want to go to the bother of maintaining bulky hardware like NASs in their house and just about anyone really who needs a very robust long term solution for storing data and cares about data permanency. And that's really what Mdisk is offering is unique value that that that claim. Some would say it is disputable. Others would say I'm just going to buy into it that it can last for 1000 years. Sorry for these changes to my screen size. I'm going to just keep myself very small as I go through the slide here. Now, here's what you actually need to do. So let's say you're going for it. You're a videographer, you're a YouTuber, and you say, Hey, this is a brilliant little technology for my needs. And I would say if it suits you, it's really, really is a great technology. Here's what you're going to need. Okay. And it's not a big list. And by the way, compared to some other forms of storing media for archival purposes, like LTO, Mdisk is really cheap. You don't need LTO, for instance, you need an expensive LTO drive. And then the cassettes might be cheaper, but it's like, you know, a couple of 1000 bucks for the drive, you can guess a Mdisk reader writer for about 100 bucks on Amazon. So that's what you're going to need. You're going to need a Mdisk burner. And I do my fingers because burner actually isn't correct. When we're talking about Mdisk, it's actually an engraving process. So let's just stick to reader writer, you're going to want one Mdisk drive, they come in two variants, you have internal Mdisk drives, ones that'll plug into a desktop computer, and you have plenty of external Mdisk capable drives on the market, they do need to be Mdisk capable, you can't just buy a Blu-ray drive off the shelf and hope it'll write Mdisk. But the good news is, there are such things on the market. The technology is still in use. I'm not quite sure who's keeping Mdisk afloat, but clearly there are companies still producing it, so someone must be buying. So one spindle of Mdisk, right, $50 on Amazon, if you want to buy a 25 pack, if you want to go cheap, you can probably buy them for less for like a five pack. Storing, you know, and these are just tiny items here, something to store your finished, so you want to put your DVDs in something like a case, I keep mine in a little box and you know, those individual dual cases, $20 perhaps. Now, and then you want two copies, and this is important, right? Why two copies? Again, all good backup approaches, even good archive approaches, as we're talking archive not backup here, require two places to store your data, one offsite, one onsite. So you're not going to be burning one Mdisk every time you have data to archive, you're ideally burning two copies. So you fill up your 25 gigabytes on your computer, you want to archive it, you want to burn that data two times, not just once, and one is going to be stored in your house. The other, you can be a bit imaginative if you have a place, it's just to get it to a different location. If you have, you know, some storage in your office, or you're lucky enough to own two homes, so you can keep one in each home. You could post discs periodically out to your relative and say, I'm going to send you an Mdisk in the poster by DHL once every few months and please put it up in the, in this box. You could find a friend who's also into backup and do a little backup exchange with him, you send him your discs, he sends you your discs, et cetera, kind of like a Synology house, something like that, you know, a technical version of that where it actually goes over the internet through a program, you could just literally meet your friend in a bar, restaurant, or just use the postal service. Now the good news is that because Mdisk is still kind of obscure, you don't have a ton of choice regarding your options. So just plug in, this is all these, these are all these screenshots are, I bought this one, the LG electronics thing. No, I didn't, it's too cheap. Sorry, that's a DVD. So you want to make sure, type in Mdisk Blu-ray. This one is the Blu-ray capable internal drive and you'll get a, they'll give you an Mdisk as well, which is cool. This one is only DVD. So don't buy that, bad example, sorry. So just buy, and it's about $75 for an external drive. And I use Linux and it works just fine. If it works just fine on Linux, it probably works on any operating system that you might have. Just remember, and as I said earlier, you want the Blu-ray Mdisk and you don't want the DVD ones. The reason I say that is because Blu-rays hold more data. So you'll still find Mdisk DVD burners on the market and Mdisk DVDs, but I'm not sure why anyone would want them because they store only a fraction of the data of the Blu-ray versions. Now, I don't say this disparagingly, you can save a bit of cash because it's really, you know, money is money and all that. It's $10 cheaper on Amazon to buy the inkjet printable ones for the same spindle and the exact same disks, 25 of 25 gigs. If you don't trust me, look it up yourself. But from what I could see, it was the exact same product. The only difference being that this one has Mdisk on each disk and this one are blank intended for inkjet printers, you can still just get a sharpie and write. So I'm buying these now because I've been investing quite heavily in this Mdisk thing. And 10 disks. So you'll figure out the predisprice is a little bit more expensive than Blu-ray, but you're getting this special long-term storage for that money. Final thing you're going to need on the software level, you're going to need some burning software that can write to the thing. In this particular case, I don't think you need something that says it's specifically Mdisk capable. And I say that because it's the unique properties of the Mdisk is the composition of the disk and it's the type of laser needed to write to that disk. I think on the software level, there aren't any differences in terms of the protocol. So for that reason, I don't think it matters what I don't think I think any Blu-ray burning software will write to Mdisk, but I can't be I can't say that for sure. All I can say is on Ubuntu, I've written Mdisk successfully using K3B. On Windows, you have Burnware and I'm sure if you Google, just Google Mdisk's burner for Mac, whatever. So here's my workflow, just to explain it. This is literally just screenshots from my NES. Total transparency here. So I have an NES in my home and I have a video backup folder. And as I finish these YouTube videos, I put the MP4s there off my computer. Then I wait, then I wait, I'll skip a step. I've gone ahead, sorry. So then I wait for this to fill up to about 23 gigabytes. That usually takes me the best part of a month. Then I add a bit of, I haven't done this, sorry. I don't want to say porcupies in this video. I haven't gone to the extra step of adding parity data to fill up the remaining things. But if you know more about burning software, you can add a bit of parity data to fill it up. So I just put 23, when I have 23 gigs with their bytes, I write my two copies onto my Mdisk. Okay, then I delete them on the NES when they're done. All right, and you don't even need the NES. You could just store it on your computer. And then when you've got 25 gigs filled, you put them on. I just have an NES. I figured I may as well save the space on my computer. And I then bought a few little accessories from Amazon. I bought some dual cases. Hadn't seen those in many years since the CD era ended. I bought a little box for my 10 bucks. I have a label printer. I stuck some labels on. And that's really it. There's nothing else to see. And I put them in the box. But that is actually about three years worth of YouTube output, believe it or not, in that case there. And buy yourself some Sharpies. They do make special Sharpies that are supposed to be DVD safe. I'm not sure if it's a real thing, but you may as well be safe. So Google, put DVD safe marker into the search bar on Amazon and buy yourself a few boxes to have ready. And then I just have a little spreadsheet so you can see that I've written here A007. So I went over to this kind of archiving system. And I just have a little spreadsheet. And I say A007 is YouTube videos from August 1. And then maybe if I need a second disc, I'll do A008. And it's the second run of YouTube videos from August so on and so forth. Oh, and then here's my seat. Here's my big secret, the offsite library. So as I said, you need to offsite it. So this is actually my offsite box. It's currently sitting in the USA at an undisclosed location. Top secret stuff here, guys. You can see I've same box I bought two of them. I literally flew out with my M discs on an on an aircraft. My M discs came with me on an international voyage. And this is what just for anyone curious, they actually look like from the back. They're kind of a dark brown, I guess you could say. Now just a few things to wrap to kind of round this video out with information wise. Firstly, they do look the same. It's the same form factor as a CD or a DVD. But they do store that data differently using an inorganic layer. And that's why, as I mentioned a few times, you need M discs drive specifically to drive them. Because it's kind of a wacky process, you're literally burning, well, you're sorry, you're pitting away at an inorganic layer with stronger lasers and you will find in Blu-rays. That means it's slow, not surprisingly. I don't get the full speed rated on my M disc burner or the disc for that matter. I get like one times. So it takes about an hour and given that I burn each time twice, it's two hours a month and I don't even need to like monitor the process. I just, you know, see my NAS is up to 23 gigs. I download that, I say burn two copies, I put it in an M disc, I put it at home and then I post one out. It's pretty, it's about probably 30 minutes of active work per month at this point for me. And I don't think it's bad. Yes, it is more pricey than Blu-rays and DVDs. And if you're just looking at it at a data cost perspective, you're going to find that HDD, aka hard drive and Clyde storage is cheaper, but nothing wrong with Clyde storage. It's assuming it's stored on RAID, but for HDD, bad medium for long-term archival storage because of BitRot and the always extant potential of catastrophic failure. There's been other YouTube videos by fellow data mavericks and they say, I know we know it sounds wacky and we, we know you're thinking M like optical media is dead, no one use that anymore. It's still considered the best long-term archival media bar none really. I know it's shocking. Some other things say some people are skeptical on Reddit, particularly if I'm people on the data hoarder, some Reddit saying, ah, we don't know, is it really true? Anyone can make these claims, it's data protected. You got to make your own mind up sometimes in life and I have faith in the tech. That's all I'm going to say. I'm not going to get into the arguments because I don't think anyone can prove without revealing trade secrets, no one can prove or disprove fundamentally the claim of the 1000 year thing. I'm going to do, if I'm still making YouTube videos in 10 years and still kicking through that matter, I will do, here's my M disc 10 years later to satisfy some skeptics. But you know, just, just, just to point that out. Some people worry, this is a more, I think, point in concern. Some folks worry it's going to be deprecated overnight. So like you're going to wake up and there's going to be no M disc burners on the market or no M discs. Here's my point. I actually don't think that's a bad point. It's probably going to happen at some point in the future. But I don't think there's any real, any substantial risk that that's going to catch you completely off guard because we're talking here about backward compatibility. So when backward compatibility doesn't support M disc, doesn't support the burners, there's no burners left in the market that are compatible with modern computers, then you have a problem or no, sorry, then you're then you will have a problem if you don't do anything. And at that point, maybe it's 50 years from now potentially, you know, take that M disc library and put it on the next thing. But this isn't actually criticism of M disc. This is something fundamentally inherent in computing in general, computing, computing and digital data storage just isn't that old. And what's cutting edge today is going to be where M disc is today in 2030 years time. And the same thing's going to apply. So it's not really a criticism of a fair criticism of M disc, I believe I'm sorry, I'm driving myself crazy trying to find the exact right position for this for this new microphone stand. Anyway, guys, I hope that was somewhat cogent and clear. I do really think it's an amazing tech. I do really think that it's something unique. It's the only storage medium that I'm aware of today that the that its engineers have actually put some thought into permanency, right? We're living in the era of immediacy, we can access cloud data at the finger at the at the touch of a keyboard. But in this mad rush for stuff that works now, we've we've kind of lost sight of data resiliency as an objective. And when I had that conversation with Barry Lunt, I felt like it was we had we had a bit of a trouble with that interview because the connection was bad. But when I watched the interview back on my own YouTube channel, I realized we were it was like a meeting of the minds because Barry was saying his concern is I don't want to trust my data, my life's work, let's say to AWS or Microsoft, they don't have a vested interest in keeping your data safe. If you if you die, God forbid, whoever you are watching this YouTube video tomorrow, how do you know that data is going to stay so when Barry shared very openly that, you know, his motivation was kind of stuff related to almost death, I would say, or mortality of, you know, you just want to have our data secure for the next generation. I was like, that is exactly why I got so excited when I find out that M disk existed, because that's where I'm coming from too. I love Google Drive. I love Clyde computing. But when it comes to the data, like whether it's a podcast or writing or paintings or any anything that you're putting that's the imprint of your life, that I want to have my own control over. I want to in a in a location physically I can access or someone can access on my behalf in the event that I'm no longer on this planet. So when he said that, I was like, ah, Barry, you and I, I get to I get this project. And that was when I decided I am going all in on M disc, I'm going to buy M disc, keep buying them, keep backing up with them until I can't do that any longer. And then I'll look to the next approach and I'll keep you guys updated. Because I do think this is a special technology and probably vastly underappreciated. In fact, I would recommend I recommended it to all my friends who are into photography. And they're saying this is a great tech, you know, if you have an offsite backup location, you have somewhere safe on site. This is great. Yeah, I think it's totally a viable replacement for cloud for archiving, not for backup. Remember, we have to be very clear, not for your production, day to day data pool, not for your backup pool. We're talking here specifically about long term cold archival storage very, very, very, very important to be clear on that difference. Anyway, I hope this video has been useful if you're also getting into the M discs or we just heard about them through Prasanna and and WC Preston, Mr. Backup. Thank you guys for watching. If you'd like to get more videos for me on different tech subjects and potentially more M disc videos in the future, do drop a subscribe and a like. It helps the channel reach more people. And of course, thank you guys very much for watching this video.