About Permanent Memory

I never planned to start an archival service. For over a decade, I was deep in the startup world - building apps, chasing metrics, optimizing retention rates. I was good at keeping people glued to their phones. Too good, maybe. Eventually, the endless sprints and pivot meetings burned me out completely. I couldn't code anymore. I couldn't even pretend to care about DAUs and conversion funnels.

But something stayed with me: this quiet need to preserve things. Not the polished products we shipped, but the messy, human artifacts of actual life.

The Moments That Matter

It started with small discoveries. An old "My Documents" folder from high school — a perfect time capsule of teenage ambitions and terrible HTML experiments. Medical notes from a difficult period when everything felt blurry and uncertain. Creative projects I'd almost deleted a dozen times. A relative's hard drive, entrusted to me after they passed, full of photos and documents I'd never seen.

These weren't Instagram moments. They were the real stuff - fragments that, looking back, told the actual story of a life.

Years ago, I went through a difficult period that made me realize how fragile memory - and identity - really can be. In the aftermath, I became obsessed with preservation. Not hoarding for its own sake, but saving with intention. I thought: if I ever needed to piece together who I was, maybe these digital breadcrumbs could help.

Finding the Best Solution

That personal need sent me deep into research. I wanted Library of Congress-level preservation, but for regular people. After months of testing and reading archival studies, I kept coming back to one answer: M-DISC technology, created by Barry Lunt and Matthew Linford of Brigham Young University.

Here's what convinced me: M-DISC doesn't rely on organic dyes that fade. The data is literally etched into a rock-like layer. Department of Defense testing showed these discs surviving conditions that destroy regular media. When burned correctly with verified hardware, they're rated to last 1,000 years.

But here was the problem: the workflow was terrible. Consumer-grade M-DISC burning is a mess of compatibility issues, verification headaches, and conflicting advice. Most people give up before they even start. Even I - someone obsessed with this stuff - found it frustrating.

Building Something Better

That's when I realized: if I wanted this to exist, I'd have to build it myself.

Permanent Memory is my answer. We've done all the testing, solved the compatibility puzzles, and created a workflow that actually works. Professional burners. Verified media batches. Multi-point validation after burns. SHA-256 checksums on every file for your own verification. Optional parity protection. Everything documented, everything verified.

This isn't mass-market, and that's intentional. It's for people who get it - who've inherited a relative's digital legacy, who've lost irreplaceable files to a dead drive, who understand that some things deserve better than a cloud subscription that might disappear.

I see it in the crypto community, carefully etching private keys into steel. In photographers who've watched platforms delete their work. In families trying to preserve grandparents' stories. We all have our own reasons for wanting permanence.

Why This Matters

Every disc we ship is handled with the same care I'd want for my own memories. Redundancy options available, because geographical backups still matter - I always burn two copies of my own archives. Archival materials, because details count. Hand-verified, because automation can't judge what matters to you.

This service exists because I believe your story - messy, complicated, real - is worth keeping. Not just the highlights, but all of it. The drafts. The fragments. The things that don't seem important until suddenly, years later, they are.

Permanent Memory is built for that moment of recognition. And if you've felt it too, I'd be honored to help you preserve what matters.

— Mike Chang, Founder