Subj : Preserving History in a Digital Form: How-to
To   : All
From : warmfuzzy
Date : Wed Dec 28 2022 21:12:25

I would like to discuss the preservation of digital media in this article... There is a really great tool out there called RedFox AnyDVD HD.  It can rip any BluRay or DVD film.  Now I'm not suggesting that you pirate materials, but rather that you have the ability to copy them in a byte-per-byte exact copy in the form of an .ISO image file.  Again this works on all digital film media, and if its not being distributed for personal profit or used in a way that would decrease the producers ability to earn money from their creation, then I see no problem in backing it up.  Different regions of the world have different laws according to Fair Use, Fair Dealings, and Copyright Law in general.  Where I live you are allowed to make a backup of your disc for the purposes of backing it up---that is to say for the purpose of archiving it.  I personally have an archive of some videos not for my use, nor for the use of others, but rather to be archived for future generations use who will find my archive when it is at that point rendered Public Domain.  Just imagine being able to see the multitudes of thousands of material kept in digital form for consumption in a hundred or more years from now, all of it free, and all of it being exact copies of the multi-media.  One day I hope to have collected and archived tens of thousands of content for the purpose of preserving digital culture and history.  I don't distribute it, I just intend on keeping it available for future generations to consume at no cost due to the Copyright having expired.  That is basically the definition of Fair Dealings (Canadian copyright law).

The AnyDVD software is expensive.  You're looking at around $120 USD for the full version, once you have it though you can use it in an unlimited fashion. For preservation of multi-media on digital mediums you are looking at doing up several strategies for preservation of the content.  The first thing to do is to back it up on a large SSD (Solid State Drive) and also backup all the materials on to m-Discs, which allows you to burn BD-R's using etching of the surface rather than changing the properties of the disc's dyes.  mDisk technology is very different than standard BD-R discs.  One uses a laser to etch (dig into) the disc wafer, while the old technology simply uses the dye that colors the bottom of writable discs by using the dye to encode the data on.

So, what I'm getting at here is that during the backup process you should use various kinds of media just so that after the 100 or more years of storage they are still readable.  mDisc technology offers this ability, but due to the high cost of mDisc media I would recommend that you be redundant in types of backup media being used, such as adding a mirror of the media onto discs as well as SSD technology.

I hope that this has sparked your curiosity and you follow on this line of intrigue in your own media archives.  As long as you're not distributing this for profit and keeping access to your archive a closely guarded secret then you may succeeded in having the archive accessible to massively large groups of people in the generations to come, having the media preserved and available for access free of charge, open, and copyable, in 100 years from now, after the copyright has expired.

Good luck on your adventure to preserve history that it may not be lost to time.

Cheers!
-warmfuzzy

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