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In time, we'll all consider this issue (the dearth of physical media) one of the most important of our current era.

The bulk of all that precious data your family is hoarding is going to bite the dust before you do.

All those drives with your home videos are rusting away. They won't last into your old age.

All those photos you entrusted to FA*NG companies - some of whom won't be around in 10 years, and none of whom will remember they ever had your data in 50 - they're going away, too.

If you want to keep your data into your old age, you might have luck with a tape drive, but I wouldn't trust the tape to last 50+ years, nor the ability to find a working drive that can read them.

The only viable option for keeping data, if you give it serious thought, is recordable Bluray.

So decreased availability is lousy news for the public. For future historians... depressing.

The only viable option for reliably keeping data is to care.

Keep several copies in different locations or on different services. Use these storages regularly so you always know they are accessible and working, or at least check them once in a year. If one of them goes bad (service discontinued, media unreadable, technologically outdated, whatever): find a new location for your data and copy it all over.

Everything else isn't reliable long-term storage, but a lucky shot that might work for you in 50 years, but might as well irrecoverably go down the drain in the meantime.

Bluray or not, much of your comment is sensible.

That said, maybe one in 1000 people here is going to successfully stick to a regimen of regular backups all the way to their old age. That's the HN crowd, not the general public who have never heard of the Rule of Three. People get distracted with life, or become incapacitated, or find themselves moving across the country, or make mistakes.

Without recordable Bluray, it's all much more difficult. Discs don't need regular checkups the way magnetic, cloud and electronic media do because they have fewer issues drying out, rusting out, suffering head crashes or suddenly vanishing due to someone else's corporate decisions.

From what I can find online, the lifetime of a BD-R disk is only 5-10 years. Those recordable Bluerays you're holding on to may _already_ have gone bad.
I think that's much shorter than real life outcomes.

Just last week, I was looking for some old data. I dug through a small collection of cheap CD-R backups from 30 years ago (hard to believe the tech is that old!). Probably 12 discs in total. No problem physically reading any of them. The only issue is that one of them was recorded in an old pre-OSX Mac format that my Linux laptop struggled with, but I was able to access it on my 2015 MacBook.

I didn't want to sound like an advertisement, but I use M-disc media. It's basically Bluray, but should last a couple centuries. The M actually is for 'millennium', but I wouldn't bank on 1000 years.
I have a Verbatim M-DISC BD-R that I torture test. It was one of the first ones I burned. I burned it in 2018. I flex it all the time, use it as a coaster on my desk, leave it out on my patio in the sun for weeks at a time. I rinse it off with pool water and wipe it off with paper towels. It has yet to lose a single bit.

If this 20ish gigs of data hasn't had a single bit of corruption, I doubt most of the other discs in climate controlled storage in multiple locations have had much errors either.

There are many sources saying that BD-R discs should last decades if not a 100 years. One of the main reasons why BD M-Discs never took off was the fact that they didn't offer any substantial advantages over regular BD-Rs.
I could read several QIC-02 tapes after ~15 years (~'90 to '05). I tried again after 20 years and the tapes jammed. I guess the tensioning system lost it's elasticity.

HDDs I had from ~1997 started to accumulate bad sectors after ~10 years. HDDs from 2010 are still good today, but just to be safe I'm using RAID5 with different batches of drives and 2 offline backups.

I saw a 5.25" 360K floppy that was used daily to boot a 8086 until 1997 (I have no ideea how old it was, but it really was a 360K, not a 1.2MB, re-formatted low density). I have early 1990s 3.5" 1.44MB FDs that still work. Late floppy disks were mostly singe-use bad.

The biggest problem with tapes was the ISA-based controller. No such troubles with HDDs. PCIe to PATA or USB3 to PATA are still available today. I wonder how long QLC SSDs will hold data? Is it turning into a "buy new - copy old data - keep 1 year - repeat" ?

I've thought about this a bit, as well. Simply as neither physical nor "cloud" services can really be expected to last.

The solution, in my mind, is that there should be an open source standard of "grouped media items" which can be easily imported / exported between services (being: a diy home server, or a cloud service, or a "burn to disk" program, etc.) which then allows for easier redundancy and updating.

For a very simple example, you could use a zip file that you upload everywhere and put onto USB/CD-ROM. But whatever the system is, it would have to be easy and attractive to use.

I'm trying to go about doing that with building digitapes[0] but I don't know how to really build "a standard" other than building something and hope that it becomes status quo.. (I'm also getting way too into work recently, so I need more time and energy to work on it)

It's a little bit embarrassingly unfinished in all regards. But eventually I want to make a system where an app allows you to easily share your files onto S3, which you can easily download onto a disk, which you can easily connect to mirror on YouTube, etc. All open source and independently connectable.

[0] https://zukini.io/posts/digitapes-model/

> The only viable option for keeping data, if you give it serious thought, is recordable Bluray.

I believe you meant M-disc.

How about make a copy to an external drive? If you want to be sure do 2. Check them every 5-10 years, replace as needed when connectors get discontinued (eg Firewire -> USB-C).

Bonus: Keep backup with external cloud service.

No need to make overly complicated. No need to do Bluray.

Modern drives wont last 10 years unpowered in storage, you are between leaking Helium and NAND losing charge.
What does the terminology in that article even mean? Are solid state drives not physical media? Are Blu-ray discs not digital?
I don't know about new releases, but I definitely have begun buying physical media (dvds) where I can. I'm extremely tired of shell games around availability on different streaming services. If I can't have my own copy of it, I'm not particularly interested in it.
I've even started storing digital music on my own server, something I haven't done (checks timestamps on old mp3s) in 15 years.

Musicbrainz Picard is a huge life-saver when managing your mp3/CD-collection, it can tag even the weirdest crap with every mp3tag you could imagine.

Same with DVD/Bluray, you can get them crazy cheap nowadays and ripping is a breeze with makemkv. With the current storage pricing you really don't need to compress DVDs even - and if you want to, it's like 10-15 minutes with GPU acceleration.

I just need to build proper tooling to cross-reference a list of movies I want vs sales available in the stores I use, doing it manually when I remember it is a huge chore.

I can understand the move back to physical media with CDs, because for almost all people on almost all audio equipment, 44.1khz 16bit is indistinguishable from higher resolutions.

DVD though, is just objectively terrible quality. And you have to deal with region restrictions, unskippable anti-piracy propaganda etc. Before we moved we just gave away about 200 DVDs because we couldn't even sell them.

Physical media itself is quite a pain too, which I re-discovered when I recently ripped my ~300 CD collection. I am very much enjoying the experience of listening to "my own" digital collection though - it's far more satisfying than trying to remember/discover what I want to listen to on Spotify.

I was surprised to find that it's quite easy to buy DRM-free, CD quality (or higher) digital downloads these days from bandcamp, qobuz etc. I wish it was like for that for video.

24-bit audio is obviously a noticeable improvement even on $150 headphones. I don't know why you think that. Similarly, 4k Blu-ray is obviously vastly superior to crappy compressed streams from Netflix or YouTube.
> DVD though, is just objectively terrible quality.

But I can play it on many devices, or it can be format shifted if needed.

I can't play Blu-ray on Linux even if I had a compatible reader.

I can't imagine doing this: DVDs look SO awful on modern displays that it's just not worth watching them. Besides, you can get super-high-quality copies elsewhere if you want your own copy of something. Of course, then you have to worry about storing it long-term, using various backup and archival strategies.
I buy most of my games on blueray and for almost all of them I can’t play them because when inserted into the Xbox there is an update to download often the size of the blueray, sometimes +100go. Even on day 1 of the launch of a game I have to download a patch. Some games won’t start without downloading the patches. The only reason to have a physical disk in the case of a game is to be able to sell it, otherwise the disk is just the key
How long before it's considered a piracy?
> while most modern hard drives are lucky to make it to five years.

Lots of people say things like this, but I have still never even heard of a normal consumer disk with normal access patterns¹ failing in even ten years, across dozens of hard disk drives (3.5″ PATA, 3.5″ SATA, 2.5″ SATA) and solid state drives (2.5″ SATA, NVMe). The last disk I remember hearing of failing was probably around ten years ago, and it would probably have been fifteen years old.² I’ve heard of laptops dying of other causes, but not disk failure any time recently.

Now USB flash drives, I definitely encountered a few failures at less than five years of age over a decade ago (in 2011, I started one week running some tech for an event with three sticks 2–6 years old, and by the end of the week all three were dead!), but haven’t encountered a failure in the last decade (mind you, I haven’t used them as much either).

By similar token, I’ve heard people saying things about consumer-written optical media commonly becoming unreadable in a decade with careful storage, but never had any issue with reading CDs burned fifteen years ago.

All up, it seems to me that people commonly say all these things barely last a few years, but it just doesn’t match my experience at all.

—⁂—

¹ The only thing I’m excluding by this is Backblaze storage pods, which are clearly not typical of consumers, and will obviously hasten mean time to failure.

² My favourite drive at present, one that by rights should have failed, is the second drive in my laptop: 256 GB capacity, 326 TB read, 140 TB written, 119% used, SMART failed. It spent the first threeish years of its life in a Windows laptop with 8 GB of RAM and a workload that would have filled 32 GB of RAM. This caused lots of swapping, amounting to about 500 GB of I/O per day. It fails SMART and has 2031 error information log entries, but still works fine for now, and hasn’t got any worse since I rescued it. Oh, and I also improved its aboriginal habitat, giving it another 8 GB of RAM when I upgraded my own laptop to a 32GB stick; the owner said that made the laptop perform much better.

You were just lucky.

I have seen plenty of old Seagate or WD HDDs failing. In a few cases that was just a couple of months after the expiry of their warranties. In some cases the motors failed, in other cases they began to show very frequently bad sectors.

These were among the almost one hundred HDDs that I have used in my personal computers during a few decades. Judging from your tiny 256 GB HDD, you might have mostly used small HDDs, which are more robust. I have typically used only the models with the largest capacity of each series, which are more prone to failures, due to having more disks (i.e. a heavier load for both the motor of the disks and for the coil actuator of the head assembly) and with narrower spacings.

Before switching to magnetic tapes, I have used many HDDs for backup and archival purposes. After such HDDs have been kept in cold storage for a few years, few of them did not have any corrupt file. However, I have always kept duplicates for each archival HDD and even when both HDDs had a few errors, they were not in the same place, so I have never lost any archived data. The files were stored with hashes, which caught some cases when the HDD had read the file without apparent errors, but the file was corrupt despite that.

I just told my young boys about this sad news.

They've recently gotten very into visiting retro gaming stores and buying DS, Wii and other console games.

The death of physical media means the death of video game stores (eg. EB games), and the death of the second hand market, the very market which allows retro gaming stores of this generation to thrive.

The kids of my boys won't be able to experience the games of the next generation of consoles because their game stores will have been shut and entire generations of games no longer available unless said company decides to re-release them again.

That's just games.

Movies have a similar problem. I can see Archive.org becoming very popular for accessing what publishers have decided they no longer want, or care for, being available.

It's really too bad there isn't something like M-Disc with a 1TB capacity and the price of current BD-R discs. We're missing a good data archival solution these days.
Agree. LTO devices are crazy expensive. I hope HAMR will boost HDD capacities such that you will be able to use a HDD as cheap archival storage. I would expect you can get a good 10y from a HDD you keep off but scrub once a year. Long enough for storage capacity to have increased another order of magnitude.
I don’t own a 4k TV, yet, but someday I would like to watch the Lord of the Ring movies in 4K. It seems silly to buy the discs and a 4k player when I don’t anticipate buying a 4k TV anytime soon, but… I keep wondering if the physical disks or the player will go away before that day comes. Is this FOMO or a realistic concern?
It feels like FOMO but I don't work under the same rules you do.

The disks would be hard to find, but the high resolution content wouldn't; piracy. The disks would probably last for as long as you'd remember them, same for the player.

The player could almost surely be adapted to whatever display when the time comes. Will it? Dunno.

Finding a player wouldn't be too hard. We're not in niche format eras any more. There are standalone devices and consoles that can both make due

So the article that wants me to feel good about physical media being replaced with (DRM-encumbered) streaming contains embedded media which proudly proclaims:

This video is restricted from playing in your current geographic region

In the words of Dr. Evil: "Riiight."

Title is clickbait trash. They’re only ceasing production of recordable media, they’re still producing commercial disks.
I can't see the next generation of the Sony Playstation console be as successful as the PS5 in my area if they abandon physical media altogether. A lot of people still use console games because they can sell and buy games second hand.

The price would need to go down to a spotify/netflix monthly subscription for people to use a console without physical medias in my area.

For those thinking about long-term data storage: first and foremost it's a process, not "a thing to get done".

Think about both a) migrating and b) growing capacity needs at the same time vs your usage pattern. It may happen that for your case any write-once media is simply never the best choice. (it will always take a lot longer to migrate a stack of CDs/DVDs/BluRays than to plug a new bigger drive alongside the end-of-live'ing old drive)

(and please appreciate the Venn diagram of `backup` and `long-term storage`; it's not 100% overlap)

Sony is not the sole producer of recordable Blu-ray media though, right? This concerns a Japanese factory and the BD-R I have in front of me says Made in Vietnam.
I read that the only factory making BDXL-R is closing. Regular BD-R may still be made but its capacity is so low.
Drive compatibility with blu-ray is horrible. Unlike DVD, which seems to work with any major OS—Windows, Linux, OS X
In terms of just data, I haven't had issues with compatibility with Blu-Ray drives. Every drive has been pretty much plug and play in at least Windows and Linux. Discs have been immediately readable in both OS, and every drive has worked just plugging in USB or SATA.

Now, playback of DRM content? That's been a mess on Linux, pretty straightforward on Windows.

Because PC Blu-ray drives didn't really take off?
This is bad. With no immutable media, society is very vulnerable.

We will regret this.

Sony is just one of manufacturers of Blu Ray media and as far as I know the others will continue manufacturing them.

Also, not sure what you mean - as a regular consumer you still have access to immutable media to distribute whatever you want - is there some specific example that you have in mind that you're worried about now?

There is no immutable media. The closest we have currently are carved stone (of which we have examples of some surviving thousands of years (the vast majority hasn't survived)).
I just buy internal high-capacity (at least 10 TB) HDDs and use an USB SATA controller. I use Borg backup for archival, at least 2 copies on 2 HDDs. It seems more reliable than DVDs.
As long as one never misses a back up, HDDs are fine. They're more laborious though. With the right optical disc, you can get away with just storing your discs in light-proof boxes and forgetting about them - with an HDD it's wise to copy the data over to a fresh drive at least every few years. Capacity, price and speed is the issue with optical media. With one M-disc, you get only 100GB, and the cost of the discs adds up.
Is tape reasonable for aficionado home users?
If you can stomach the very high cost of modern tape drives, then.....yes? For long term archival I'm not sure the value is there though.
I have a blu-ray writer, and blu-ray disks, from Verbatim. The article implies Sony is ending humanity's ability to do archiving on blu-ray

Is Sony affecting Verbatim's ability to produce these?