Verbatim M DISC BD-R DL 8x 50 GB 25 Pack Spindle 9

Optical media is still the best option for longevity when it comes to file archiving, so when I made a time capsule to put inside the wall of my house, I wanted to use the best of the best. Verbatim is one of the only brands I use for recordable discs, and the M Disc is no exception. It burned error-free and will hopefully be ready to read whenever it's discovered, hopefully whoever finds it can get a hold of a Blu Ray player!

Super high quality, you get about 96g of storage, lasts forever, haven't had any disks fail to write so far.

UPDATE: I like this product. So much so I purchased it again. But one would hope that they would be packaged properly. My last order arrived it a flimsy plastic bag. The product box had been damaged. One corner of the box was caved in and the box itself was almost open. One of the jewel cases had a visible crack in it. So I had to take the time to open all five jewel cases and inspect each disc. All discs appeared to be undamaged. All of this could have been avoided it the discs had been properly packaged (i.e. in a cardboard box.) Until 5D is available and affordable, this is the best game in town. I burned 6 of this discs and all worked perfectly. It's a bit overpriced, but it's nice to know the files on these discs will outlive me.

I closely followed the invention and introduction of M-Discs, because, perhaps foolishly, I wanted my family pictures and videos to last forever. Or at least a long time. Archiving anything digital now days is a huge problem. You have a bunch of choices, not all of them good. It's not like the old days where black and white photos from grandpa's photo albums or Kodachrome movies stuck into a closet could be pulled out 50 years later, and there's a good chance you'll still have an image. If you put your digital media on a hard drive and stick it on a shelf, the drive could easily seize up if you pull it out 10 years later. Flash drives are just as bad. You may not have anything after 10 years. The cloud? Now somebody has to pay the bills. What happens when environmentalists figure out all those data farms are a huge source of CO2? Or your grandchildren decide not to pay the Cloud monthly payments? Your digital memories are toast. So along comes M-Discs, which have a completely different formulation than standard organic dye blanks. The Navy allegedly compared M-discs to ordinary blanks by putting them out in the sun and rain. Data on M-discs survived a month of abuse. The other discs? The data was gone. Great. You can stick M-discs on a shelf and they'll be fine in 50 years because they say they last 1000 years. But wait! Will anybody have the players functioning? Look how fast storage technology is changing. Can you get grandpa's 8mm movie projector to work? Does your car still have an 8-track tape player? That's the problem. And to add to the confusion, supposedly some French Technology agency did another test of M-discs vs. "ordinary" archival blanks, and found they were all about the same, and that a little abuse made the data vanish. A completely different outcome from the earlier Navy tests. All these presents a real dilemma. I've rolled the dice and still use M-discs. I put warnings all over the labels I make to keep the discs out of the sun and hot attics, and to occasionally review technology options in case media needs to be transferred to new "better" storage mediums. You really just have to trust that somebody down the road cares about the past, and if they don't the good thing is YOU won't be around to care either. For medium term storage M-discs are great. You have your data, your privacy, and some level of extra durability. The NSA and the North Koreans aren't culling through your digits in the cloud, and thinking about erasing them. However, remember. Your house can burn down. Make an extra disk and store it elsewhere. Preferably out of a flood, fire and earthquake zone. They cost quite a bit more than ordinary blank discs, but I've never had one fade out like the ordinary organic disks have faded. And I also back things up on hard drives just in case. Multi-site and multi technology storage is about all you can do to keep your stuff for a while.

Been using these to back up old photos for long term storage