Anyone understand why M-disk DVDs (4.7GB) are so hard to get these days? You used to be able to buy them in convenient quantities, like a dozen or so. Now almost all M-disks are blu-ray (25GB). I got a DVD writer that was M-disk capable. Now I need to go out and buy a blu-ray one? I don't need the extra storage!

The entire burning industry is shrinking as businesses move to other storage formats. There are still a few commercial uses for BDs but I suspect the 5 GB limit plays a huge factor for why the M-disks are getting rarer.

Thanks. Of course, I'll buy a blu-ray writer, and in a few years the blu-ray M-disks will disappear as well. It's funny that a medium that was designed for permanence is, in fact, pretty expendable.

That being said, one has to wonder what a reasonably compact, resilient, and wholly archival medium is these days. USB sticks are nice, but they need refreshing every decade or so. Regular CDs and DVDs are the same. Hard disks seem to be pretty permanent and, if you have a few of them, you can avoid being screwed by mechanical failure, but a few external hard disks make for a sizable pile.

- clay tablets
- paper books

I recall a government agency that asked our company to back-up some 5.25" floppy discs and some 3.5" discs to a modern hard drive. We explained to them that the content on those discs (circa 1982-1988) was technically transferable to a modern hard drive but there was no computer programs available on a modern computer that could actually read the data.

They agreed to transferring the data regardless of their inability to ever decipher the content in the future.

In 50 years will a modern computer be able to read a .JPEG? I guess there will be such a history of certain files and codecs that they will always be supported on some level but when it comes to archiving it's difficult to predict.