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100GB BD-R

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Kawasaki, 2020.04.21

I'm giving up my account on "Dropbox", a cloud storage service that's been around for years but has been getting progressively more expensive and in some ways frustrating. Realizing that I won't have access to my system at home before the account expires in mid May, and that I have half a terabyte of photos on that service, I've been frantically downloading everything to the small hard drive on my laptop. So tonight I went back to the "Donki" at Mizonokuchi and picked up a Blue-Ray burner. Reading (what I could) of the literature on the back, I was (un)surprised to notice that Japan is two generations ahead of the west in this technology and that it's now possible to write 100GB to the blue ray discs.

Unfortunately my laptop has only the old USB 2.0 ports, so writing that much data takes over an hour. But the medium should last a hundred years, so any of my descendants who are reading this can know that there's a pair of discs out there somewhere with tens of thousands of my photos from "the before times". (Boy I hope civilization comes through all this.)

rand()m quote

A problem well stated is a problem half solved.

—Charles F. Keating