Forever Disks' mission is to document, organize, and preserve information about optical disk cartridge formats, including Magneto-Optical, Phase-Change, WORM, and other related formats.

This information is preserved for both today's users and future generations. Accuracy and integrity are central to our mission, and we strive to faithfully document the history, technology, features, benefits, and limitations of each format.

Forever Disks is an ongoing work in progress, currently maintained by a small team. We intend for the collection to grow and evolve over time as research continues and new information becomes available.

HBM has been working in public-sector IT since 2018. In his free time, he enjoys learning more about computers, working on his cars, and spending evenings with his wife. Below is his account of the creation of FD and what led him to begin this project:

I began travelling down a deep rabbit hole while trying to disable the Intel ME engine on my laptop in May–June of 2026. Research into that topic pointed me to early Lenovo ThinkPad laptops which were easier to modify, but expensive when purchased from eBay. While looking for a good deal, I learned about the Goodwill online auction site, which often had these older laptops for very cheap prices. While browsing ShopGoodwill, I discovered many Sony Mavica digital cameras which used 3.5 in floppy disks as their primary storage media. This caught my attention as floppies are not a common format for digital cameras.

Sony created many models of these cameras and I amassed a collection of over thirty of them in short order. I would purchase large lots of untested cameras, repair them, function test them, get them clean, then resell them as refurbished units. To test these cameras, I wanted to buy a few floppy disks that I could then bundle with the cameras when I sold them. This led me to research floppy disks, their technologies, and similar variants of the format.

Around the same time, I heard about Sony MiniDiscs which used a magneto-optical recording technology. This optical disc enclosed in a protective shell made a lot of sense to me and made me reevaluate my distaste for optical media that I developed in my youth (mostly from scratched discs). I saw what these devices were supposed to accomplish before the market decided that cartridges were too clunky and expensive and that's what led me to want to write up all of my findings in a series of articles on my personal site. As the scope of those articles and my knowledge on the subject increased, I decided to spin up a Wiki in September 2026.