this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2024
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Digital streaming is displacing the last remnants of physical media.

In a disappointing turn of events, FlatpanelsHD reports that LG has ended production of its Blu-ray player series, which includes the UBK80 and UBK90 models. With limited stock available, prospective buyers should act quickly to secure the last remaining units before they are sold out.

After Samsung and Sony's departure from physical media, LG was one of the last major manufacturers of Blu-ray players

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (4 children)

I guess home users will be without any viable long-term backup media soon. The only ones I can think of are those special blu-ray discs that promise to last for archival. After that we have spinning disks, but those only last a few years and will eventually be phased out, and then all we'll have is flash memory that degrades rapidly. Oh, and paying through the nose for someone's cloud service so they can hold our data to ransom while mining it for AI, and delete it as soon as we miss a bill payment.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Oh, and paying through the nose for someone's cloud service so they can hold our data to ransom while mining it for AI.

That's what "they" want. lol. Everything seems to be pushing that way for sure.

Though I am a little less pessimistic about spinners fully going away until all-flash datacenters are the norm. I've also had some running for close to 10 years, and they're going strong (I've also got much newer ones as well)

I forget the article I posted here months ago, but there's a new optical format which is in the multi-TB range. Not sure if/when it'll be commercially available, but maybe that will come about?

https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/23/optical_disc_breakthrough/

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

That's technically promising, but I can't see it being a mass-market item since most people don't care about backups, so it will likely be prohibitively expensive for most home users.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

but those only last a few years.

Where do people get this information? Hard drives are very stable now (as are SSDs). All of mine are still going strong after 6+ years.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

That was true a while back, but yes drives have gotten way better.

That's just failure rate though, not data loss. You need your drives using a sane file system like zfs or using raid 1/10/6 where discs can do error checking as well to prevent silent data loss.

They also need to be powered on. Offline drives will lose data to bit rot over time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

The lifetimes have improved, but according to your link, the currently measured average age of a drive at failure is 2 years, 10 months. They expect that to increase as they roll over to newer, more reliable drives. These drives are under heavy use, unlike drives used for offline storage, but still it's not really the kind of lifespan you'd ideally want in an archival medium.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (2 children)
[–] weker01 1 points 2 months ago (2 children)

ZFS is unfortunately not in the upstream Linux Kernel :/

Btrfs is worse in many aspects but I like its flexibility of adding drives with different capacities over time.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

How did we get becachefs upstreamed but not ZFS?

Edit: Nevermind, it's licensing related

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

OpenZFS works just fine.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

What about it is better?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Blurays are too small for backups anymore. It would take hundreds of them to backup all of my stuff. If you want long term backups, you have to spend a couple grand on a tape drive.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

I disagree. You're the exception, not the rule.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

They're pretty expensive.