Question Blu-ray writers are they worth it, what alternatives?

[right_to_know]

Are blu-ray writers worth buying at this point in time. Memory cards lose their charge over time and hard discs can fail so a better solution is needed.
Are BR DL 50gb discs good enough or should people go for the writers that can manage triple layer 100gb or are those discs too expensive to make it worthwhile? Some of these writers can use M discs which are claimed to last for 100s of years.

Is there anything better around the corner. What is the best to buy for storing GBs of files?

 

[BarkingGhostar]

Part of this is probably because Sony, the developer of the storage platform and by use of storing its movies on them, has left the organization. It is, for lack of any other words, a dying technology. Sony is fully invested in the world's ability to stream its content.

 

[mikeford]

Everything now is moving toward "the cloud", and I don't trust it. OTOH I hear G5 bandwidth will be a game changer, so could be cloud and streaming soon for everybody.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

LOL, gamechanger. As someone involved with it, good luck on that. And again, make your own cloud.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Everything now is moving toward "the cloud", and I don't trust it.

"The cloud" doesn't exist. It's just a fancy word for someone else's computer.

...and I don't trust someone else with private important data. Too many unknowns.

 

[Fallen Kell]

encrypt and backup to cloud.

You expect some cloud service to still exist in 10 or 20 years from now? If you go by past president, if/when the companies that offer these "free" (and even paid for) services fold up shop because it is not profitable enough, people simply loss everything stored there, many times without any warning (because giving a warning tells potential investors that things are getting bad/desperate and they don't want to throw money at a sinking ship).

 

[Fallen Kell]

Network Attached Storage (aka NAS) ? Cheap, low power, with vendor support including security updates , TB worth of storage , easy accessible with full ecosystem behind them. QNAP and Synology are known leaders in this space..

For some people this might be fine. However, it is subject to attack from bad actors/viruses/ransomeware. If you want true long term storage, tape archive or optical media is still the way to go, as this lets you move them to a different site (in case of fire/flood/tornado/earthquake/disaster) such as a bank safety deposit box, where you can easily keep TB's of data secure and unable to be easily destroyed/altered (and if you are really paranoid, multiple copies at multiple locations).

 

[sdifox]

You expect some cloud service to still exist in 10 or 20 years from now? If you go by past president, if/when the companies that offer these "free" (and even paid for) services fold up shop because it is not profitable enough, people simply loss everything stored there, many times without any warning (because giving a warning tells potential investors that things are getting bad/desperate and they don't want to throw money at a sinking ship).

Then physical plus cloud. You are supposed to have multiple backup anyway

 

[mikeford]

Is there still any viable tape format? Was there ever?

Paranoid reliability is some combination of mirrored drives, incremental saves, ideally a keystroke level of infinite undo and undo undo, and rotation of mirrors in an offsite queue. Add to that archiving permanently and replacing oldest drive in the remote queue.

 

[right_to_know]

USB external writers I just put a powerbank on the second USB "power" cable.

Fry's I think had 128GB thumb drives for about $25 in the latest sales flyer, for the most part that kills the idea burning data on a disc. All the smaller stuff goes on a thumb, and we have 10TB of disc, only practical backup is to mirror it to other drives.

The benefits of writing and reading data seems to point to solid state solutions and not optical or magnetic.

I have heard that those forms of data storage lose their charge eventually and start dropping data.
Is there something like a solar powered trickle charge to help avoid this problem?

 

[mikeford]

I've been spending time on r/datahoarder and learned ...
LTo is a tape backup format, drives about $4k, tapes $100 for 18TB.
BD rom comes in 3 flavors, 25GB, 50GB, and BDXL 100GB. M-disc looks like best option for archival, not cheap. Some drives, aka all the cheaper ones, are known to have issues about 25GB media.

Somebody must be offering the service of burning your data to your tape, with their drive. If so maybe the best option.

 

[Fallen Kell]

LTO is a good solution that has industry backing with testing/modeling to see how long it will last as a reliable medium for storing the backup. As you mentioned the drives can be expensive, but if you don’t mind going back a few generations, things can be had pretty cheap. For instance you can find LTO5 drives for around $200-300. These still support backing up a pretty large amount of data (1.5TB uncompressed, 3TB compressed) on a single tape. You can even find some of the tape jukeboxes/autoloaders for $400-800. Tapes can still easily be found and are about $20 each. The nice thing about LTO5 is that it should support ltfs, meaning you can basically use the tape drive as a standard file system (i.e. browse the files backed up on it, and copy to/from it).

 

[killster1]

USB external writers I just put a powerbank on the second USB "power" cable.

Fry's I think had 128GB thumb drives for about $25 in the latest sales flyer, for the most part that kills the idea burning data on a disc. All the smaller stuff goes on a thumb, and we have 10TB of disc, only practical backup is to mirror it to other drives.

That said, I have a few BD burners at this point, so in "some" cases I can see putting "some" files on BD burnt discs, but so far haven't bought any.

Looks like "about" a buck each for single side 25GB, so about $40/TB, cheaper to buy hard drives.

I would prefer bluray media to usb flash drives fir backup. I use bluray to archive photos on 25gb discs. I dont remember the price but I believe it was Japanese disc's shipped from Japan (at the time they said they had the best media most reliable) its been 5 years and they show zero damage degradation.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

I would prefer bluray media to usb flash drives fir backup. I use bluray to archive photos on 25gb discs. I dont remember the price but I believe it was Japanese disc's shipped from Japan (at the time they said they had the best media most reliable) its been 5 years and they show zero damage degradation.

So long as they're phase change media, the discs should do 25+ years easily. I have DVD-RAMs (no, not a typo) burned in '97-'98 that are still perfect to this day.

Edit; a few CD-Rs from the mid '90s too. Perfectly readable, but then, I did use good quality media. (Kodak Gold discs)

 

[mikeford]

Burning discs I would pop the extra money for M-disc media. Seems well worth waiting for a sale though.

 

[mnewsham]

Part of this is probably because Sony, the developer of the storage platform and by use of storing its movies on them, has left the organization

Based on what? From the BDA website, Sony is still listed as a member of the board of directors.

Further sony makes big money from a Bluray extension they've been pumping out in recent years called Optical disc archive.

As of early 2020, Optical disc archive discs can store 500GB per disc and are sold in 11 disc cartridges.
This is double the density of existing consumer bluray (128GB per side for a maximum theoretical 256GB for a double-sided quad-layer disc).

So clearly, the technology isn't dead if sony has spent the last ~8 years refining and selling what amounts to enterprise-grade bluray (with a corresponding enterprise-grade price).

Now CONSUMER bluray is certainly not looking too good in recent years, little to no development, and very little reason considering the state of streaming.

 

[killster1]

These are great for short-term storage and backup, but they're useless after that.

sounds like you are a expert, how long before your bluray discs failed? (did you store them on your car dashboard?) i have thousands of burnt cdr that still work 100% from the year 1999.

 

[mikeford]

By the end of the year all of my essential data will be in RAID with two levels of mirror, plus a burn to M-disc.

 

[mnewsham]

Not an expert but just speaking from my own experience.

Must be fairly limited experience.

At my work we have CDs from the early/mid 1990s that still work just fine, and we've moved several of our things over to Bluray without issue. Besides, anything genuinely important will have multiple copies made anyway.