 Hey guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosilla here bringing you this video from the bottom of a rabbit hole A deep rabbit hole and a scary rabbit hole What I want to talk about today is a situation in the world of data storage that I think is pretty crazy and other people would say This is an imaginary problem But I think it's a real problem and I think it's worth talking about For those who are interested in data and storage and I know this YouTube YouTube channel covers a whole bunch of different topics and But some of the people who have seen my previous videos on Everything backup related might be tuned into what I'm going to talk about today When it comes to backup, which is a long-standing interest of mine within technology both something I've been doing You can't really call backup recreational, but something I've been taking seriously on a personal level for years even my Work has brought me into doing some marketing work for Companies in the backup world and backup and storage kind of go hand-in-hand because when you back something up You have to store it somewhere. So I've been looking for years years probably not probably years actually into Storage long-term archival storage and a scary truth has gradually unfolded for me The truth is as follows when it comes to storing your data cold On a shelf not connected to electricity not in a server not in an NAS blah blah blah There really is nothing that is Long-term stable currently in existence and I think this is a really crazy situation. I'm holding in my hand What my research so far so far and I'm not claiming to be The world expert on this. I know about as much as some people in this fear There's some people who know a lot more than me a ton more than me. I'm talking about not professionals in the enterprise storage space I'm talking about just hobbyists the data hoarder subreddit is where us crazies Discuss but my research today and that of seemingly other people has led me to believe that this kind of weird Storage media that I'm holding here, which is called m-disk These are blu-ray m-disk the m-disk I thought I've covered another video It's a type of archival storage That is supposed to hold your data for 100 or 1000 years depending on the class the difference between an m-disk I'm going to just show you guys an actual m-disk Take one of my spindles. I'm waiting on my m-disk reader or burner, but I have my actual m-disk M-disk, and this is what it looks like on the back. You can see the webcam. I'm using to record this video with It's basically a type of Blu-ray or DVD depending on which one you get that instead of having this standard layer has a layer of What they call an organic rock-like material its exact composition is a trade secret But it's intended for archival use specifically, so it's supposed to be really really durable So like a regular DVD or blu-ray this stuff is supposed to really last with your data, but These things are pretty obscure the company that developed the technology Melanillata went out of business It went bankrupt and now verbatim has the magic formula and they're making these But it's just crazy to me to think that this random form of blu-ray That like only one company makes is the best that there is and even that's not perfect now This to me is just a crazy crazy thing like when we're talking about storage This might sound all very abstruse and what's this guy Daniel doing talking about storage? And he's talking about these crazy tech topics. It's actually not abstruse at all or abtruse or abtruse Whatever word you want to use Data storage. I mean every anything digital your your wedding photos your businesses computer files, etc This is actually the day as our lives are all lived online. This is the stuff of everyday life. It's essential now Some of the reading and watching I've been doing recently is I'll just swap over to this screen. This is a really good video It's from the council of state archivists. So again, don't listen to don't rely on my knowledge of storage media But do rely on that of the council of state archivist because if you if if if someone knows about resilience of data, it's probably a Archival organization, right? So this video is really good. It's called FAQs on BitRot It's not the stuff of it's not a replacement for Netflix or Hollywood block blockbusters, but it does do a really good job and basically what they come to come to say is that you know Nothing is immune to bit rot this slow process of the degradation of media now again I say this is crazy because what they come to in the video at the conclusion of this video And that's why people who discuss this on Reddit the data orders subreddit will say as well Well, what's our solution to bit rot? What's what's our solution to this crazy situation currently? It is storing multiple copies of data. It's It's redundancy. It's having you know one copy here And maybe you have a check some off site or you just have two off sites and one on site And that way you can manage the fact that BitRot might affect one data pool because you've always got other data pools and when we're talking about off-site backup We're talking about Stuff and even if we're doing live on-site backup not cold backup. We're talking about, you know Storage sitting in an NAS. It's got raid going on. There's some kind of checking and data scrubbing technology or work there But it's still pretty wild to me at least to think that when it comes to there is no such thing currently as minus these and I mean Mdisk kind of is kind of our solution The reason I say kind of is because well firstly their capacity is capped at 100. I haven't seen discs bigger than 100 gigs It's a slow process. I gather to write to these. I haven't done it yet, but I understand it's slow and tedious and It just seems to me that this is not this is this is great I mean, it's better than there not being something like this But it's probably not the ideal long-term archival storage media and people would say well isn't tape LTO gonna do that job and Everything I've read so far Indicates that tape is susceptible to to BitRot Now I don't have a source for this I've just read it in various places on the internet But I mean if you think about the storage media that are out there Did you just a couple of very random graphics? I pulled out of Google images, but they seem reasonably good to me because they at least include a tape So you have hard drives and SSDs They're 100% definitely susceptible to BitRot because they depolarized over time and the magnetic charges Holding the bits and the bytes and when you think about it now again a little bit down the rabbit hole here When you think about how many bits and bytes aren't something as simple as this little graphic on my screen It's actually mind-boggling how any data managed to be stored for any length of time at all right when you think about the Millions of ones and zeros and ones and zeros that are in even something as simple as this never mind a 4k video It's miraculous the tech we have today, but it is fallible. So Hard drives and SSDs BitRot for sure RAM is is a live storage medium. So let's skip that likewise RAM CD DVD optical media Apparently as I said the best thing we have and not CDs and DVDs specifically but M discs being the very best in class within that category for archival floppy disk I have no idea about floppy disk they haven't seen or used one in Probably over a decade, but I do I do remember the capacity was like minuscule memory cards and pen drives are both notorious for Failing and I've never heard of anyone using them for coal storage There's stuff you put in your cameras and get the data out of it and again LTO is what people whenever you mention the word archival or coal storage people say LTO LTO tape But again, I'm waiting on a response on Twitter from Mr. Backup the world's foremost backup experts whose podcast I attended I was kindly invited on to as a guest a number of years ago That was a great honor Curtis Preston very very interesting guy, and he knows crazy Amounts I guess really the world's foremost authority on the sole subject of backup and storage. So It's a great honor to have Encounter the guy even digitally, but this is the current situation we have so the what I want to say is Is crazy is as follows the two two crazy things one? It's crazy That with all the r&d effort humanity's gone to all the crazy advances in storage capacity think about it remember the floppy disks that could hold one megabyte something like 1.4 megabytes now I practically have one on my desk here I have a little I have in my camera a 512 Gigabyte micro sd card. That's about this big 512 gigs half a terabyte and I've seen terabyte micro sd cards Literally a fingernail can hold a terabyte. So we've managed to compact storage Exponentially exponentially exponentially in such a short period of time and yes We have yet to develop a storage media that will hold your data indefinitely guarantees. I don't want to say M disc I don't want to say It's kind of what this is supposed to be But I'm kind of a bit hesitant to say but we have M disc because of the fact that From what he understands there's a lot of it and M disc that's not proven and Pardon me things. Well if M disc was really such a Unbelievably resilient storage media as it claims to be it would probably be it would probably be less of an obscure thing It's crazy that and that's crazy fact one crazy fact to don't say it's that you are crazy Daniel crazy fact Who is that the solution to this problem? Which I think is a legitimate real R&D problem and tech that no one talks about almost Is that the solution is to is the cloud and as we all know the cloud is just someone else's computer So when you actually put those two facts together you You you can say the following statement is being true We don't have humanity any form of cold storage medium that is To the best of our knowledge that has been proven conclusively to be absolutely as good as etching Into rock like the ancient Egyptians did back in their civilization The problem of course is that you can't really etch billions of ones and zeros Into rock in any way that would fit or that could be read and the second part of the this this craziness That I submit is craziness is that the solution and the cloud is beautiful But the solution to that problem, and I don't think this is a good solution is to Give over all your data every digital bit and bite every photo every video Every digital asset you create during your lifetime and entrusted solely to the cloud So yeah, you could use two clouds you could have if you're trying to back up a Movie for posterity you could say well, I'm gonna put it in three clouds I'm gonna put it in Amazon s3 I'm gonna you know you did a movie that was like your life's masterpiece and you never wanted to lose this data Yeah, you could put one file one copy in s in Amazon AWS One copy in backlays and one copy in another cloud cloud storage provider, but you can't Count upon your copy the copy physically sitting in your archive or your home At least in a simple manner without talking about Chexums and periodically rewriting and detecting bit rock blah blah blah. There's nothing you can just say there is such thing as a special magical Archival class hard drive that is written and the data will store their indefinitely permanently absolutely no questions asked within 99.99999 percent Success rate that to the best of my knowledge doesn't exist and I think that's pretty whack There you go guys. That's my little a tech ran for today. If you've any thoughts about this This is I wouldn't say it's keeping me up at night, but I still can't quite wrap my head around this So if there's something I'm missing or you have thoughts to add to this commentary spiel Please feel free to leave me a comment not many people care or are interested in this topic I do realize that but if you're one of them and have have thoughts that across Drop me a comment. Thank you guys for watching this video. If you want to get more for me Please subscribe to this youtube channel. Have a very good day