The Millennial Disk

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?

Comments

[John Ralls]

No good. Still needs hardware that no one will have in 50 years.

This is the right way: http://www.rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/

[boeufdaisy]

Unfortunately, they base their estimates for data life on cuneiform (clay); hieroglyphics (paint or ink on paper or stone); and the Rosetta Stone (granodiorite stone), none of which materials they actually use, and on the mythical "Golden Plates" which - even if they were not a figment of Joseph Smith's imagination - are also not the technology they intend to use. I suspect the "Golden Plates" are being alluded to primarily as an advertising gimmick in Utah.

And, though *some* cuneiform, heiroglyphics and stele inscriptions have survived, many have not. It's a logical fallacy to say that if some records of a given type last a thousand years, all such records, or even most such records, will.

I'm guessing that permanent as the etching may be, these things will still die the first time Uncle Steve uses it as a coaster for a hot mug of coffee or Aunt Bessie sits on it.

[Dae Powell]

At $25 to $30 per disk, I'd think that important data would justify the cost. The unanswered question remains: what is the price of the Millennial Writer hardware? And since the disk can be read by standard DVD players, would it not be more cost-efficient for archivists and the public to pay a service to record the data? I'm just thinking aloud here . . .

Happy Dae·
http://ShoeStringGenealogy.com

[Bill Buchanan]

In the case of many storage media, the deterioration of the media becomes the limiting factor.

If technology continues to advance, there should be no difficulty in re-recreating a suitable reader if the stored material is perceived as being sufficiently valuable. Just because you cannot buy a reader in "off the shelf" in a few hundred years is no reason to say that the media "cannot be read" IF the media itself is still intact. In the case of microfilm for example, simple optical equipment will allow the data to be read even if "microfilm readers" are no longer built.

So maybe along with the stored long-life media we need to store a book giving all of the technical instructions for building a compatible reader. Building these may not be a job for your average home handyman, but converting old media to new could be a great business opportunity some time in the future.

[chris]

I think we should just stick with Paper and protect them with acid free sleeves.
chris

[Shon R. Edwards]

I work in the Family History Department at the Genealogical Society of Utah. I know of many of our storage tapes that have gone bad (several percent of the IGI, for example), never (or maybe a better word is only partially) to be recovered. In the beginning of digitization, we were promised (to help us accept digitization) that as we digitized, we would be getting microfilms of these digital records. Unfortunately, when it started, we had no such microfilm being created. When I asked the head of "digital preservation", an oxymoron in and of itself, he said that it had proven "too expensive" and the decision had been made to simply skip that little detail. I'm still an advocate of preservation, even if paper or microfilm has to be used to do it. I hope and pray there will be made a way to preserve other than "spinning the images on a couple of servers" and migrating from one medium to the next. What if budget cuts (as we are witnessing all around the country) force servers to shut down, closing public access to valuable information? I only hope I can get the information on my family that is pertinent to them, before it goes away for some reason (lack of funds, contractual restrictions - this is also a problem - sometimes we have put up images, only to take them down later because someone found a problem with contracts). I just hope for the best, but I still vote for microfilm and paper, which seem to be our best options at the time. I would never give up digital, which has many great capabilities, but I have also printed my genealogy on paper and donated them to the society and been given a free donor microfilm microfilm print of the same.