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Hey Ho, what ever happened to the promise of Blu Ray Recordable/Rewritable technology?
As far as I know, Blu Ray as an archive medium has not caught on like DVD-R/DVD-RW did in its heyday.
Of course, part of this is due to the cost of hard drives and how much they've come down in the last decade.
Still, there are advantages to having your data on discs. I've been researching a Blu Ray recorder and discs to go with it and it looks like the best option is Ebay, with most sellers from Asia.
I use an external 4TB hard drive (bought an internal version supposedly designed for home servers with better warranty and put it inside an enclosure with fan purchased at newegg)
I back up without raid, basically cloning the drive 1:1
So you think? Depends. I'm researching as we speak on longevity of data. Which will last longer...optical discs or electro-magnetic technology. FIGHT!
Hopefully with the emergence of 4K videos, the companies will advance Blu Ray tech. There is already a specification for 128GB disks. That's a whole lot of data for one disk.
I haven't really researched blr ray but I would imagine the tech hasn't changed that much, witha DVD or CD commercial discs are pressed into a very thin sheet of metal very similar to how a record is made. Discs you burn are literally burned into a chemical. Both are susceptible to failure especially the burnable media.
The wen depends on factors like the disc itself, there is only a few companies that make burnable media. Most brands are re-branded and the quality can vary. You can research that here:
The burner, firmware and even the software can affect the quality of the burn.
Bottom line is they will fail and with all the variables it could be next year or might be 30 years from now. While it makes for a good alternative backup I wouldn't rely on it as primary backup.
Blu-Ray comes in handy when you have to send a large amount of data. For example, if your upload speed is 4 Mb/s, it will take you 56.8 hours to send 100 GB of data nonstop. Or you can spend 20 minutes burning a few BD-R and drop them at the mailbox. And it is a lot cheaper than shipping a hard drive, or even a pen drive.
The pricing of hard drives have slowed down the adoption of BR for data. It's uncommon to have to transfer 100GB of data at a time... and when you do, it's usually to someone you can share a USB drive with.
I'm certain that there are times where BR discs can come in handy... but those times are rare.
I use a RAID5 NAS in a vacation home as a backup. Fault tolerance, and alternate location. Unlike with optical media, I don't have to manually backup.
I haven't really researched blr ray but I would imagine the tech hasn't changed that much, witha DVD or CD commercial discs are pressed into a very thin sheet of metal very similar to how a record is made. Discs you burn are literally burned into a chemical. Both are susceptible to failure especially the burnable media.
The wen depends on factors like the disc itself, there is only a few companies that make burnable media. Most brands are re-branded and the quality can vary. You can research that here:
The burner, firmware and even the software can affect the quality of the burn.
Bottom line is they will fail and with all the variables it could be next year or might be 30 years from now. While it makes for a good alternative backup I wouldn't rely on it as primary backup.
And what would you use as a PRIMARY backup? From cursory research, optical still is better than hard drives for backup in terms of longevity.
I think the key to data longevity that we all can agree on is REDUNDANCY. Back up your precious data in as many different types of mediums as possible as well as have copies in multiple locations.
That's all good and well but at some point it becomes cost prohibitive unless you are Google or Amazon and do redundancy in "the clouds" with multiple physical locations around the world.
All this talk reminds me of the first time I backed up data to an optical disc. It was to a CD-R and I used the legendary Ricoh drive. It was so magical. Good times indeed and yes, we do live in interesting times.
My primary backup for most files is 2 drives in a RAID1 configuration that is "My Documents", "My pictures" etc. This insures everything that is current is backed up, it is not 100% bulletproof but nothing is. With the RAID1 configuration you almost eliminate the most common reason for loss of data which is hard drive failure. The OS and applications reside on a SSD. Whenever I install something I make sure any irretrievable information is stored on the RAID drives.
I make backups of the contents of the raid drive to a networked drive but I really need to work out a better system to keep it more current. Larger files like videos unless I'm working on them I have only on the networked drive and the original tape is stored at relatives house.
I have BR burner here and I'm going to use that for making backups of the RAID drives to also store at relatives house but the issue there is keeping it current.
I have my own server so I have additional options like storing backups of the most important files half way across the country.
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