The sickening click-crunch-whir of a dying hard drive. The ever-spinning-never-seeking DVD. The undetectable USB flash drive. The three telltale signs that a significant portion of your life is about to disappear into the digital ether. We’ve all been there. We’ve all wished that we’d made a second backup, or kept our optical discs out of the sun — but we haven’t, and the data is lost. So it goes.

But what if you had a backup medium that was nigh indestructible, almost immune to inclement conditions, and made of stone? You’d have the Millenniata M-Disc, which is basically a 4.7GB DVD with a data layer made out of stone-like metals and metalloids. The idea is that conventional, home-made optical discs have a very soft recording/data layer that isn’t very resistant to heat, humidity and light, while the M-Disc on the other hand has a much tougher data layer that can withstand the test of time. M-Discs can’t be burnt with your current DVD burner — melting stone requires a laser that’s five times stronger than normal! — but on the flip side, M-Discs are backwards compatible and can be read by normal DVD drives.

Now the actual statistics: according to Millenniata and the US Department of Defense, the M-Disc is incredibly resilient. 25 different discs, including the M-Disc, were exposed to 85C (185F) temperatures, 85% humidity, and bright, full-spectrum light for 24 hours. Where every other archival-quality recordable DVD failed the test with thousands of read errors and complete loss of data, the M-Disc passed with full data integrity and just a handful of errors. Millenniata even goes on to say that the stone layer of its DVDs should retain data for over 10,000 years — but the polycarbonate coating is only good for 1,000 years. Still, both figures are just slightly larger than the 5-10 year average lifespan of hard drives, recordable DVDs, and flash drives.

Storing data for 1,000 years is certainly a magnificent claim to fame, but does it stand up to real-world scrutiny? For a start, at around $7 per disk, the M-Disc is incredibly expensive for just 4.7GB of storage. Next, to use M-Discs as your primary backup medium, you would need vast amounts of space to store the discs: to back up just 10 terabytes (one Library of Congress) you would need 2,130 M-Discs, which would occupy about the same space as 10 hard drives — and it’s safe to assume that the US Department of Defense, or any other big institution, has petabytes rather than terabytes of data to back up.

Finally, if you want to read your archive of M-Discs in 1,000 years, you’ll need to find a DVD player. In a day and age where floppy disks were created and destroyed in 20 years, and optical discs are fast being ushered out of existence by portable form factors like the smartphone, tablet, and MacBook Air, do you really want to push all of your chips towards M-Disc? Rather than regularly copying backups from one medium to another to ensure integrity and contemporaneity — which is how it’s done today — are you sure that it’s wise to spend thousands of dollars on a storage medium that might be antiquated in just a few years?

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You can pre-order an LG Super-Multi Drive capable of burning M-Discs, or buy an M-Writer for $145 (and M-Discs for $6.50 from the same supplier).

Read more about the Millenniata M-Disc or read the complete US Department of Defense report.