You've been reading the Hackernews Gopher portal like a regular person, right? Well, occasionally, you see stories about data storage systems suddenly corrupting a shit-tonne of data. First, it was something about WD servers intentionally breaking down unrecoverably after 500 hours of uptime or something like that. Then it was about SanDisk Extreme SSDs becoming corrupt somehow, costing people 3TB. Then, of course, there's all the questionable sellers from Taiwan on Amazon and Walmart who claim to sell terabytes of SD storage for an affordable price when they're really just using improperly-formatted 2 GB SD Cards from the turn of the last decade; tales of people buying up handfuls of "256 GB" SD cards only to run out of space in 45 seconds.
Right now, DVD-R is seen as nothing more than a drink coaster by hobbyist datahoarders and IT specialists alike. But, I'm not concerned with business. Neither am I concerned about data as a hobby. I'm thinking about people freeing themselves from corporate feudal shackles and torrenting things. These are not people who are going to be able to afford things like 3TB SSDs or even 2TB HDDs. You can get 470 GB of storage space on a spindle from Memorex for nearly a quarter of what WD wants for a USB hard disk drive, and you won't need to lie awake at night worrying about whether the DVD-R is going to be able to survive into next week. For a start, you can see if something is going wrong with the disc. Verbatim dyes their DVD-R's a tasteful cast of purple. If the purple turns green or brown, you've got a problem. That's not going to happen for about 20-40 years, though. What may happen is scratches and scuffs from regular use. If you handle your disc media with care—never touching the data surface with your bare hands and storing the discs in jewel cases—you are literally holding a piece of media that is going to last long enough for your children to use it. As long as there are optical drives, you're safe.
I guess that's the thing, though, isn't it? For about the past 10 years, huge corporations have been waging a mass smear campaign against physical media; Google, Microsoft, and Apple are even building devices that have no USB interface; all to sell subscriptions to their cloud services. They're all trying to make people believe that physical media of all kinds—DVD-R, USB, SD cards—are as obsolete as the IBM PCjr; plus, they're using their power to put the squeeze on manufacturers, like Memorex and WD. If a computer has no optical drive, why continue making DVD-R's? If a computer has no USB ports (it ceases to be a computer at all, and), why continue making USB hubs and flashdrives? If a computer has no SD card slot, why bother using anything but a cloud service, monitored by at least 12 foreign and domestic spy agencies, to store all your files?
Hobbyist datahoarders are trying to get everyone to use datacassettes. Not like what we think of as "cassette tapes" from the '90s, but high-capacity magnetic tape that, under climate-controlled conditions, will last for an indefinite amount of time. Well, the tapes might last for 50 or even 100 years, but the equipment needed to read them is highly proprietary, with every manufacturer having their own compression algorithm, endianness, and header code. If you have, say a BonzoCorp datatape (not sure there's such a company, but stay with me here) that holds 256 GB of data and will last for 228 years in a dry storage vault, that you store for about 10 years before you need that data; but the only tape drive you can find was made by Femurex, you can bet that a BonzoCorp tape is not going to run in a Femurex drive. Datahoarders are interested in the long-term storage of data, rather than the immediate uses for the data that is hoarded. In the short term, they will create a niche demand for datatapes and tape drives, but they're not using tapes all the time, cycling data in and out of them, or requiring them for really anything except storage. In end-stage capitalism, it's all about supply and demand. What hobbyist datahoarders have is a supply, with no demand. What DVD-R has is both supply and demand. There are vast warehouses full of unopened spindles of DVD-R's, destined to stock the shelves at 2000 stores because people have been using DVD-R and CD-R to store files since the literal 1980s. The drives that run them keep getting built, despite pressure from Google to stop, mostly because so many people, both in business and not, rely upon disc media every day.
This brings me back to the longevity of media. We as a society have created media so vast that it cannot be stored physically. We're celebrating the 30th anniversary of Doom this year, so let's take that as an example. DOOM.WAD alone is a 12,118 KB file (we're talking about the 4-episode Ultimate Doom here, by the way). Assuming that every page of a college-rule notebook can hold 1 byte of information, you would need 121,180 pages to contain a physical copy of DOOM.WAD, or 1,212 notebooks. That's just the WAD file; there's still the EXE that the computer needs to launch the game, plus all the various config, setup, and readme files that were contained on the original The Ultimate Doom game disc.
Historians like to point out the Domesday Book in reference to media longevity, too. In the mid-1980s, the BBC spearheaded a project to digitise the book into the emerging LV-ROM format. Ever heard of LV-ROM before? Neither have I. It was one of those high-tech, bleeding-edge formats that emerged in the 1980s as computers were getting smaller and faster, that never went anywhere. LV-ROM relies upon a proprietary encoding scheme on LaserDisc, created by Philips Electronics, which, suffice to say, probably hasn't been supported since 1987. So, on one hand, you have a written book that is nearly a millennium old which is still able to be read and interpreted by humans; and on the other, you have a useless LaserDisc that only one computer in the entire world can read, and that computer needs constant attention to prevent breaking down. The book will probably last another 1,000 years, where the computer has, at the most, a decade left.
I spoke of supply and demand before—the LaserDisc medium was never commercially viable. Its equipment was expensive and prone to breaking down, its media was also expensive and the means by which the equipment read the disc turned out to have a deleterious effect on the media. Eventually, people gave up on LaserDisc, as it was not shown to be any better than the available alternatives of VHS and Betamax. Yes, DVD rose from the ashes of LaserDisc, but that's not especially important right now. The fact is, people are starting to see cloud storage as the hucksterism that it truly is; what with files suddenly going missing because they were deemed "inappropriate", constant monitoring by AI processes, and the immediate availability of your deepest secrets to any advertiser or government agent with a bit of cash. Plus, the recent attempts by the EU, US, and UK governments to nationalise the internet, making the entire thing subject to sweeps for content that the particular agency deems to be inappropriate; it highlights a glaring flaw in cloud services in the fact that it's your files on someone else's computer. DVD-R may not last for 1,000 years; it may not even last for 20 years. But it's cheap, it's easy to back up, it takes advantage of an existing supply, and it's private! DVD-R doesn't need to last as long as the Domesday Book, it just needs to last as long as it takes to use the data on it and make a backup copy of it.
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--8 August 2023--