Why Use M Disc When There's The Cloud? (Data Archiving)

hi guys welcome back to Daniel's Tech World here on YouTube my name is Daniel Rosal recently I uh put the keyword search term mdisk into YouTube because since I began uploading a series of videos regarding everything to do with the mdisk I've been receiving quite a steady stream of emails from people from around the world uh interested in mdiscs and Optical archive and doing optical archiving so I actually inadvertently discovered in the process of doing this that apparently I seem to be the person on YouTube talking about mdisks I've uh accidentally wound up in that circumstance but I own it because I do love the mdisk and I've covered a lot of various aspects of mdisk archiving and I wanted to talk about one very very specific uh question in this video which is why would you back up onto mdisk backup or archive instead of just using the cloud like haven't you heard of the cloud right because when most people think about backup And archiving today someplace they're going to put their data whether we're talking about you know photographic data video data whatever you need to Archive to keep safe and without trying to get too sidetracked on this video it is important to understand the difference between backup And archiving and really the mdisk is an archival medium right an archive is a copy of data that you don't expect to need and you're not going to need to restore from it so you know when we're talking about mdisc archiving here's a spindle of blank verbatim mdiscs may as well do the whole gear Show and Tell just quickly because there's not that much to show really we I have my mdisc writer from LG uh it got that for about 100 bucks on amazon.com and finally dual cases for my on-site and for my offsite I'm currently filling up this Buy remainder and it's just full of these M discs so this is what the mdisk archiving process looks like there's nothing very fancy about this I label my disks with a marker just the month of the backup YouTube 0223 YouTube uh 0123 that kind of stuff these are these uh the Youtube videos from my main channel is what I'm archiving so archiving onto mdis we're not talking about backup we're not talk it's not a suitable medium because it's very slow to read from if you need and it's a very um it's a relatively small medium right the M disks exists in 2550 and 100 gigabyte variants by today's standard of data none of those sizes are very big so if you're a you know typical business consumer because most uh most private consumers don't think about stuff like backup and you want a backup medium that's quick to write to quick to restore from and can handle business levels of scale mdisk is the wrong media 100 so it's very very specifically useful for archiving right if 25 gigabytes um per disk because these are the most easy to buy ones or easy to Source ones if that sounds about right for your data needs I think they can be a great medium but it still begs the question why wouldn't you just use the cloud now a while back on my main YouTube channel which is called Daniel Rosa and I'm trying I set this one up to try to separate my YouTube footprint a bit more logically but I did an interview with the guy who actually invented the mdesk really interesting computer Scientist by the name of uh Barry lones and he said something that really really connected with me in terms of why I like using mdiscs and that's that cloud you know the cloud is fantastic I think you'd be very hard pressed to find someone today anywhere on the internet using Planet who doesn't use Cloud Computing Services on a daily basis whether we're talking about Gmail whether we're talking about Google drive or whether you're using a Microsoft product whatever the case may be the cloud is extremely useful for creating the day-to-day data that characterizes our lives however if you have valuable data that you want to protect for you know potentially after your demise not to get too morbid on it but uh Barry did mention that and that's actually a big reason I'm interested in now you might be thinking well you know why would a relatively healthy 34 year old be thinking about these things but to me as a Creator the content I create I want that to stay around right whether I have management over it or someone else you know the Next Generation has management over it I want that to be somewhere I can physically control either problem with cloud services and this is something to paraphrase what Barry says cloud service providers whether we're talking about Google or Microsoft or backblaze or Amazon S3 or any cloud provider doesn't really have a film Tropic interests in maintaining your data they're going to maintain the data in the cloud so long as you're paying a subscription free and a lot of services like Google a lot of cloud services have these kind of terms and conditions whereby if you don't log in for a period of time perhaps two years there's an inactivity detection system and your data will be deleted so my point is is this why would you want to Archive to the cloud to mdisk and not to the cloud because the cloud is quite brittle it's enormously useful day to day but if you're interested in strategically maintaining your own data for the long term the cloud is a third party over which you really have no control which doesn't really have your best interest at heart as long as you're a paying customer it's going to keep your data on their servers but that's a big caveat so if you've created something very valuable for you or for your family whether we're talking about perhaps wedding photos the YouTube videos I create photos of your loved ones that to me is a very valid reason why you'd want to take control over your data now you could another question as well what about Nas Nas uh very common in the data storage and preservation world and it's a much more scalable solution to data storage for those who haven't heard of it it's basically a server a Home Server who's which is optimized for storing data Synology is about the best known of their providers and I would say well NES are wonderful I have an NES in my house but I actually only use it as intermediate storage I put stuff firstly onto my Nas and then I archive it onto mdesk now the reason I do that well Nas is a very very secure that's the first thing to say about them in terms of uh storage right because they have something called raid which means that it's kind of immune from Hardware failure if one of the hard drives fails you're not going to lose your data which is absolutely the case if you're storing data hold on something like a hard drive or a sdd hard drives or sdds neither are optimized for Cold Storage you're going to have something called Data rot so NES are actually great and they would actually be my first choice before mdisk and in fact I store some of my data on my Nas and some of my data on my on the mdesk the reason I like the mdesk is because for it's for me the type of data I'm committing on to mdisk is archival I don't expect to ever really need it but I want to have it if the you know the videos I upload to Youtube that I put effort into producing it would be crazy for me not to keep the originals of my video I don't think any videographer would recommend doing that just uploading to YouTube and deleting the files so because I want to have my own copy I want to keep two copies one on my on-site location and one on an off-site location because that's always the best practice and backup and archive you want to have one off-site one on-site in case something physically happens too you're on site location so for me to have that um on an M disk is just a better medium because it doesn't fill up my Nas right now it's that's very much a stylistic choice you could say well I just I'm happy to keep upgrading my Nas storage as my data pool becomes bigger personally I like the approach of just being able to buy more M disks and put them in spindles and that's the way that my storage pool expands they don't take up very much space at all I can fit about 100 discs in that little folder and I could probably fit it a push 20 or 30 of those binders just under the couch that's right next to me here so it's actually quite a space efficient storage media and unlike an NES it doesn't require any power to run it's a fully Cold Storage solution now the actual value of mdisk over stuff like in NES I would say actually comes more in the off-site location I mentioned that it's always best practice when whether you're looking at backup or whether you're looking at archive to have an off-site location for your data because your house could get hit by Hurricane God forbid or robbed or whatever and if you've built up your data pool on your house that might all go to waste so the idea is that you have two physically geographically separate locations to mitigate or hedge against that risk now the beauty of mdisk here is that unlike putting your stuff into a S3 bucket you can literally just fill up right up your disks so what I do personally is one once a month I write my endisks for storage here and I simply duplicate them create a second copy and move them off-site about once a month now what can what does off-site mean it can literally mean your office if you're lucky enough to own a second property it can be your second property if you're lucky enough to own a boat you could even store your M disks on your Yas right or you could store them in your friend's house or you could post them to like a backup buddy I thought about that idea before if it's someone you really trust with being able to read your data it doesn't matter there's no rules to this the Only Rule is that it should be somewhere geographically distinct from your main location and even that there's no rules some people will say well it should be in another country some people would say it should be in another part of the country that wouldn't be affected by an earthquake if you go down the rabbit hole of thinking about risk you can really go down that rabbit hole so I would just say don't overthink it put it in a separate location what I'd like to sort of how I'd like to sum up this video is I don't think the clouds and mdisk are in opposition at all I think they serve very different purposes I think the cloud is amazing for day-to-day data storage for many people for backup purposes especially I think it's a great fit for archiving of small amounts of personal data I prefer using the mdisk over the cloud because it gives me total control I'm not dependent on any Tech technology company to hold my data in the event it gets ransomware I get locked out I'm not here to look after my own data there's something nice knowing that physically I have two copies of my own data one sitting in my house the other setting uh in whoever else I've trusted and if you really want to keep it in you know keep it personal that could be a family member for instance uh in their house or really whatever you choose I hope that's given some sort of uh feeling or insight into why despite the huge utility of cloud storage I believe personally that Optical archiving and specifically m-disc archiving is still relevant uh if you have questions about this or thoughts about the mdisk feel free to drop me an email or a comment here on YouTube and I'll do my best to respond thanks for watching the video and good luck with your own data archiving projects

Channel: Daniel's Tech World

Views: 5,765

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Id: 8PTb-xZ6YaY

Length: 11min 57sec (717 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 06 2023