You've spent years compiling your family history, scanning old photographs, copying ancestral journals and writing biographies of your parents. Completing each project, you store the information on a CD or DVD disk. Mission accomplished. The data will be there for generations to come.
Or will it?
Today's CD-ROM and DVD-ROM disks have an average life expectancy of anywhere from 3 to 12 years.
Disks go bad for many reasons, even if they're not used. Copy your data or your pictures to disk and place them on the shelf. If you pull those disks down from the shelf in a few years, you might now be able to read them. A Utah startup is about to introduce technology for writing DVDs that the company claims can be read for 1,000 years after being stored at room temperature.
Dubbed the Millennial Disk, it looks virtually identical to a regular DVD, but it's special. Layers of hard, "persistent" materials (the exact composition is a trade secret) are laid down on a plastic carrier, and digital information is literally carved in with an enhanced laser using the company's Millennial Writer, a sort of beefed-up DVD burner. Once cut, the disk can be read by an ordinary DVD reader on your computer.
You can read more in the Daily Herald at http://heraldextra.com/news/local/article_b25c9a30-7242-11de-9feb-001cc4c03286.html.
I wonder if anyone have a DVD-ROM reader one thousand years from now?
