PC Gaming

Typing them back in after the apocalypse will take a while, but you'll be able to impress all the other wasteland mutants with a working copy of Half Life Alyx.

I hope you also laminate them for longevity.

You should really move to microfilm. It saves so much space!

Print them on clay tablets. Those will stand the test of time, especially with the right level of error correction. (Sorry for the ad cancer - I didn't want to promote a specific brand or spend forever finding a good review site.)

Cheapest solution is an HDD + one more for backups. M-Discs for 15-17€ per 100GB are for the games you wanna take to your grave.

Verbatim Datalife HTL BD-R discs are supposedly made in a similar technology (some folk on r/datahoarder think they're exactly the same but idk). At the very least they won't have the same problem as DVDs (no organic dye) and they actually work out cheaper than half decent HDDs. I can get 25GBx50 cake for £30. I've only started burning them a year or two ago so time will tell if I lose my data :x.

Yeah, normal burners are more like printers, where the write laser activates or deactivates a pigment which then either reflects or absorbs the read laser to represent 0/1. But that pigment can degrade over time, turning 1s into 0s.

M-discs are instead etched and iirc use constructive and destructive interference so the reader (which is the same reader as normal discs, just the writer needs to specifically support M-disc) reads the 0/1. It will also degrade over time, but since it's a thicker layer of difference, it will last significantly longer than a thin layer of pigment. And I bet that special m-disc specific readers could be made to read it again after it degrades to the point where the interference technique stops working, since an image could still show where the high and low points are, even if the waves don't align perfectly anymore.

In practice, I've found that the drive was way easier to find than the media for m-disc. Like most optical disc writers these days seem to support it but the discs are expensive af compared to non m-disc.

Though when I was going through my old burnt CDs and DVDs, I was surprised at how well they were holding up. I was expecting at least some read errors by now but everything has been fine so far.

Well, other than the data quality lol. Not like the readability of the file but stuff that took days to download back then would download today in seconds and a good monitor I got well after my early files was only 720p for its resolution. The data I prized as a youth is kinda sad today.

Are tape drives still a thing?

blu ray in this economy?

Yep! Quote from digitalfaq

The BD-R write-once type is based on a completely new concept for the recording layer utilizing a two-layer structure composed of silicon (Si) and copper alloy (Cu) inorganic materials. When heated by the recording laser beam, these melt and the Si and Cu alloy become a composite forming recording marks. Because the material is inorganic, it is not affected by light, thus realizing a disc with outstandingly high reliability in terms of archivability.

And another quote from the same source

Write-once recordable DVD-R/DVD+R media (as well as CD-R media) all uses synthetic organic based dyes -- usually azoic dyes (metallized azo chelates or azo metal chelate). Some of them are based on other synthetic organics, such as cyanine, dipyrrometheme or oxonol.

Apparently blu-rays are even worse than other discs. This is from the abstract of an accelerated ageing study (sadly I don't have access to the whole paper):

Overall, the stability of the Blu-ray formats was poor with many discs significantly degraded after only 21 days of accelerated ageing. In addition to large increases in error rates, many discs showed easily identifiable visible degradation in several different forms. In a comparison with other optical disc formats examined previously, Blu-ray stability ranked very low.

https://www.storagenewsletter.com/2018/05/31/restaurator-blu-ray-media-stability-and-suitability-for-long-term-storage/

Big Disc Energy

The worst case I experienced was a disc that disintegrated after a couple years. It got an actual extra hole in it, in a way that looked like somebody spilled acid on it and the acid burned right through the disc. In reality it just lay in my drawer.