Japan’s digital minister, who’s vowed to rid the bureaucracy of outdated tools from the hanko stamp to the fax machine, has now declared “war” on a technology many haven’t seen for decades — the floppy disk.
The hand-sized, square-shaped data storage item, along with similar devices including the CD or even lesser-known mini disk, are still required for some 1,900 government procedures and must go, digital minister Taro Kono wrote in a Twitter post Wednesday.
I understand wanting to dump the floppy and CD, but why dump MiniDisc? Us people of culture know the MiniDisc is the end-all-be-all of storage media, and nothing has ever surpassed it. Japan is about to make a grave, grave mistake.
For price per gigabyte, almost all older mediums are obsolete.
There is tape, and then mechanical drives at the top of the hierarchy. HDDs if you have small amount of data (less than about 100 TB), or tapes if you have more. For your dollars, nothing will beat them for storage capacity.
On the other hand, for longevity, tapes are still very good, but M-Disc (archival DVDs) are expected to last 1,000 years.
Unfortunately they are no longer in production. And of course very limited in size: 1 TB would require 212 discs. (As far as I know M-Disc BD-R don’t have the same durability claims).
Anyway, I welcome phasing out all these limited, (now) expensive, and error prone mediums for modern alternatives. Their place in today’s society are at museums and personal “retro” collections.
The legacy medium I could support would only be plain old paper.
You still have UDO and in a now lesser extend MO disks.
http://www.alliancestoragetechnologies.com/data-archiving-blog/270-udo-drives
https://maxoptix.com/pages/About-UDO.html
https://www.imagestore.co.uk/storage-media-tapes-disks-cartridges/udo-disks/
Kochise,
Thanks. That makes it roughly 18 discs / TB. Still a bit too much for my taste, but there are not many other solutions for extreme cold storage.
Scratch everything.
I have been corrected:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/new-optical-discs-cost-less-than-dollar5-per-tb
1 TB discs at $5 a piece?
Sign me up… yesterday!
sukru,
Wow, that would be impressive if they were shipping. Their website says 2026, which is kind of a long time to wait, but still would be awesome if it comes to fruition. Unless it becomes a wider standard though I’d be hesitant to trust long term archives to a single vendor solution with unknown commercial viability.
Alfman,
You are right, there are support concerns.
However even if half of the claims are correct, it would make sense to just buy double or even triple of everything in case they go down under.
sukru,
To be fair, I don’t know that any of my concerns are well founded in this instance. But it’s not merely the hardware and storage media but also the software support. On both windows and linux, proprietary drivers typically create long term dependencies for ongoing OS support. If said company ceases support for any reason (say supporting out of warranty hardware is not profitable), you might have to keep an obsolete OS around just to keep using the hardware. I say this from experience, and it sucks.
Open hardware/software helps alleviate this and it would be great if Folio’s product lineup were completely FOSS, but this often isn’t the case with manufacturers. Who knows though, we could be pleasantly surprised
The japanese are rock solid on things that are intertwined in culture. If it works don’t need to upgrade it. However this philosophy is lazy. The culture rely too much on paper and tradition. Would digital conversion be easier and convenient? yes. They can easily air drop docs and files, use USB sticks for larger files, Use ipads for everyone instead of one time use paper.
As if they aren’t already doing this… this is pure posturing. Japan is probably already a decade ahead of most places on things like this.
In any case they are talking about ridding outdated tools from the government not at large… since they are already gone at large except for maybe the stamps and honestly maybe those should stick around for private use and contracts.
Seals also absolutely make sense for things like marriage licenses…. removing them reeks of centralization.
I still think my LS120 was awesome in the day
I think that recordable CD/DVDs are actually quite good to interact with a public administration.
-They are very cheap and have enough capacity for the majority of cases.
-They can be easily stored/shipped with a bunch of papers.
-They are not too small so it’s difficult to lose them (I’m looking at you, microsd)