I agree with Diego that simply trusting a durable medium is insufficient. I used to fantasize about distant future anthropologists coming upon archives of optical disks and wondering about the bizarre fetishism of a culture that seems obsessed with this particular apparently unadorned circular form…
The point with m-discs and the like is that more trustworthy media allows one to regularize the practise of regeneration of the data. With hard-drives and current standard optical discs, we need to keep a random assortment of storage methods that will fail at somewhat random intervals. This means that to really maintain an archive requires great vigilance and a refresh rate with a relatively high frequency. The life-span of a reading technology as an available consumer good is much longer in most cases than the median case survival period for a single disk. Extending the expected lifetime of a storage medium means that one can focus more on refreshing the data across technology transitions rather than constantly refreshing the data to avoid unpredictable media failure.
David
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David Rokeby
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