I was wanting to burn some digital movies onto DVDs so I can also have them that way, does any particular brand stand out for quality and reliability over a long timeline (10+ years)?
Also DVD-Rs seem to run about $0.15-0.30 each when bought in packages of 50 or 100. Do those price ranges offer decent quality or is there a class of DVD-R that is much more reliable but also more expensive?
From Wiki:
Neat, I’d never heard of gold plated DVD-Rs before.
As a caveat though, the silver/aluminum ones are about $0.15-0.30 a disk, the gold ones are closer to $1+ per disc. So I don’t know if the payoff is worth it as I can get up to 10 regular DVD-rs for the price of one gold. I don’t want to use the DVD-Rs as my main data storage for 50 years, I want to burn DVDs that will last 10 years.
I’m hoping some of the cheaper ones, if I store them properly, will last 10+ years.
Get hard-drive.
Do not mess with CD/DVD or USB thumb drives they are not reliable.
If you must use CD/DVD or USB thumb drive make sure it is backed up on hard-drive.
If there is problem writing the data to the CD or DVD disk or errors on the disk is garbage.
The higher burn speed more prone to disk errors.
Also CD/DVD disks don’t last long.
I stop using CD/DVD and never would use it again for backups.
Hard drives seem like a bad idea, they last a median of 6 years, by 10 years almost all will fail I believe.
Gold plated DVDs sound like a decent long term storage option, but 100 will run you $150ish and will only store 470GB. I have over a TB of info I want to store and that will keep growing.
It seems cheaper to just buy external HDs every 4-5 years, at least until the new media storage discs (whatever those are) come out.
You are likely better off buying two external hard drives and having a copy on each. Make sure the drives are refreshed a couple of times a year.
if you want maximum portability then DVDs are good. DVD+R are better then DVD-R. Sony and TDK are good brands.
if you buy spindles of 100 on sale then a SATA HD with an external USB/eSATA is cheaper.
The most reliable (i.e. lowest failure rate) and longest lasting DVD blank media is made by Taiyo-yuden. Get the ones manufactured in Japan, (as opposed to the ones made in their Singapore or Malaysia factories). I have DVDs that were burned over 15 years ago still working like new.
JVC would be my second choice. Their media manufacturing division was bought out by Taiyo-yuden a few years back. Just be careful not to buy old stock (before they were taken over by Taiyo-yuden).
These are supposed to last 1,000 years.
Have you considered the cloud?
An Office 365 subscription comes with 1TB of OneDrive.
…and as I understand it, they are moving towards unlimited (I’ve been given 10TB for some reason and have uploaded c.8TB).
…of course you’ll need decent internet access.
When I last used DVDs I just bought a batch of Taiyo Yudens. Cost rather more, difficult to get hold of, but supreme in what they do.
Now, I’d go for the m-discs mentioned by Beowulff. But for DVDs, Taiyo Yuden.
Those are cool. And with the blu rays holding 25GB and costing $4 each, that is a fairly affordable way to do long term storage. $160 for 1TB of data storage.
On the downside, will blu ray players exist in the future? That is like if I had all my data stored in 8 tracks, 5" floppys and betamax tapes. Eventually the devices that play them will not be sold anymore.
Where does one get Taiyo Yuden DVD-Rs that are made in Japan? I’m looking online, I don’t think they are available in B&M stores near me. And if I buy them online how do I know I will get the Japanese ones and not the Korean or SE Asian knockoffs?
The ones sold in Japan have “日本製” right on the package, which means “Made in Japan” Looking on Amazon, I found these. It says “Made in Japan” on the box. I don’t know if you need a spindle of 100, but for $40 that’s a good deal. I don’t buy DVDs anymore, but I get their Blu-ray media for about $10 per box of 10 discs.
ETA: If you don’t need the white label for printing, you can get them even cheaper.
That one says ‘Made in Japan’ on the label. I don’t know why it is cheaper, or if there is a difference of silver vs other metals.
Is the one I linked to the same, just w/o ink jet (which I don’t need)? I’d gladly pay extra for a valid Japanese made brand of this DVD-r, but Amazon has been having problems with frauds and knockoffs lately. There is a question in the Q&A section about verifying if they are made in Japan, and several people verified it.
If I get them and they aren’t made in Japan, I am hoping/assuming I can return them since that would be false advertising.
From what I know of the cloud, it costs more than buying an external HD and keeping it for 5 years (I bought a 2 TB external HD for about $80).
Even at prices of a penny per GB for cloud storage, that works out to $10/month per TB or $120/yr. If I wanted long term data storage I’d probably use the M-drives the Beowulf posted. Those are about $0.16 per GB for blu-rays but they last for years.
Either way, my goal with this thread is I have some digital videos I want to have on DVD so I can watch them on TVs that are not hooked into my laptop/media center. The topic of backing up or long term storage of my digital media is interesting, but my main goal is to have DVDs that will last 10+ years that I can watch on TVs which aren’t connected to my hard drive.
The ones you linked to are cheaper because they don’t have the matte white label for ink-jet printing. The “silver lacquer” just refers to the surface, i.e. not ink-jet printable.
As for verifying they are not knock-offs, you will have to do your due diligence and buy from a reputable vendor. I have heard of cheap Chinese knock-offs fraudulently labelled as to be made by reputable manufacturers. If you really want to be sure, you can use this tool to read the information (including manufacturer details) of blank media.
No. Buy more hard drives. At $35 a terrabyte, they are cheaper, more reliable, and much faster and easier to use than burnable optical disks.
Are you concerned your hard drive might crash and cause you to lose data?
Buy a second hard drive, and back up all the contents of the first one to it.
Are you concerned that a hacker or computer virus might erase the data on your hard drives? Unplug a backup hard drive and store it in an antistatic bag in a cool, dry place.
Are you concerned that in 30 years the data on the stored hard drive might become unreadable?
Make sure you have more than a single backup copy, and fire up the drives every 5 years and move all the data to a newer drive.
Are you concerned that external hard drives are unreliable? Don’t buy external. Buy internal hard drives, and a USB powered external caddy, like this. Think of each internal hard drive as equivalent to about 20-100 dual layer blu ray disks, and use them as if they were an ejectable optical disk.
That’s really the answer; whatever actual storage media you choose, the big thing is to make more than one, and periodically refresh it. Over time, you may have to reformat things into more modern formats (e.g. if you still have Word Perfect files, it would be a good idea to reformat them into Word nowadays).
That said, I suspect the OP wants to have his cake and eat it too by putting them in a watchable format for storage. I think I’d just use hard drives for the long term, and the cheapest DVD-R/Blu-Rays I could find for the shorter term.
[QUOTE
On the downside, will blu ray players exist in the future? That is like if I had all my data stored in 8 tracks, 5" floppys and betamax tapes. Eventually the devices that play them will not be sold anymore.[/QUOTE]
This is the real problem. Occasionally you will read of someone who has data on those huge magnetic tape reels they used in the 1960s, but no machine to mount them.