Parchive is also a must have

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive

Thanks for the pointer, this would be useful for sneakernet with cheap+large flash drives.

If people are really interested in using DVDs for archival purposes, they should really consider these - http://www.mdisc.com/, rated for 1000+ years.

Hard to believe, but apparently the discs did survive quite a bit of abuse, http://www.zdnet.com/torture-testing-the-1000-year-dvd-70000...

http://www.fileformat.info has good news feed & references on digital preservation.

I believe there are also some good tools out there for printing larger quantities of data onto paper, using ECCs and such. QR codes and other such optical encodings are generally designed for much less optimal environments and smaller data sizes; with a laser printer and a good scanner, fairly good data densities can be achieved.

It's an interesting area of research/hacking. Personally I rather love the idea of the Rosetta Project: http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/

Pointers would be appreciated. I found http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/134427-a-paper-based-back...

And a USB drive made out of paper + embedded chip :) http://www.spokanejournal.com/local-news/intellipaper-ramps-...

GPLv2 xlocate, by Alexandre Oberlin, is a GUI front-end to locate/slocate/mlocate. It supports indexing of offline media, e.g. offsite DVD backups.

http://qt-apps.org/content/show.php/xlocate?content=99529

manual: http://migo.info/xlocate/readme_en.html

Looks like their error detection/correction only works on a single disc at a time. Which doesn't protect me should the disc suffer physical damage, or loss. I wonder if they can extend their algorithms across multiple DVDs (putting the "inexpensive" back into RAID)