I’ve always been skeptical of niche archival formats, even ones as robust as this. Even if the technology itself is sound, companies go out of business and formats go obsolete. I’ve been using plain old mirrored spinning hard drives for years. And for parts of my archive, I give copies to friends and family for added redundancy.
TacticalCoder|14 days ago
> I’ve always been skeptical of niche archival formats ... and formats go obsolete ...
The format is supported by Linux, that's never gonna be an issue. Not only can modern version of Linux read DVD or BluRay formats, should the support disappear, there's not a world in which in 30 years I cannot run an older version of Linux. There are, for comparison, people running Commodore 64 and Amiga hardware, today. You'll always be able to run the software, either on bare metal or emulated.
The issue is: will you find a drive in 30 years? As they are still built today and as many DVD readers from 25 years ago are still working today, I take it it's going to not be that hard to find a BluRay drive in 30 years and hook up to a machine running Linux.
And even on a BluRay, you simply do not store that much.
If one doesn't want to only rely on HDD/SDD and online storage, it's still probably a safer bet to go with tapes: you can store much more data, newer readers can read (up to limit) older tapes and these are battle-tested, supported for a long time, available, reliable. Because, well, it's not consumer tech but enterprisey.