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Panasonic To Commercialize Facebook's Blu-Ray Cold Storage Systems (cio.com)
itwbennett writes: A couple of years ago, Facebook revealed it was using Blu-ray disks as a cost-efficient way to archive the billions of images that users uploaded to its service. When Facebook users upload photos, they're often viewed frequently in the first week, so Facebook stores them on solid state drives or spinning hard disks. But as time goes on the images get viewed less and less. At a certain point, Facebook dumps them onto high-capacity Blu ray discs, where they might sit for years without being looked at. Now, Panasonic has said it plans to commercialize the technology for other businesses, and is working on new disks that will hold a terabyte of data.
Think about it....from the description it sounds like they are essentially archived based on time of upload. So when 5 years rolls around, guess where everybody's 5 year old photos are going to be: all on the same batch of blurays. So when 5 years approaches, they pre-copy those blurays back into online storage. After 3 months or whatever, those photos get purged from online storage and the old blurays are once again the only copy.