I’ve been seriously looking at reviews on NewEgg for Blu Ray drives. I’ve got quite a few DVD ISO images that I bought and need to archive. An ISO image would typically run from 3.2 Gig up to 4 GIg. Would two of these fit on one Blu Ray disc?
The reviews over on NewEgg aren’t that great. DVD and Blu Ray drives seem to be built pretty cheap these days. I’m not sure how reliable the discs they burn.
Would creating PAR files for the ISO images give me more reliability? I was thinking about burning the PAR’s to some blank CD-R’s that I still have. That’s assuming they’ll fit. Otherwise they’d need to be burned to a DVD-r. Either way, I’d want the PAR’s on a different physical disc.
Keeping in mind reliability of the burned disc is most important. Should I just use a single sided BLu Ray? Double sided? This quad layer is claiming 128GB capacity. Is that reliable? Are they all reliable?
I have no experience with using Blu-Ray for data backups. Instead I back up my computer to an external hard drive. (Actually, I back it up to three external hard drive, so there’s redundancy in case of hardware failure.) Why are you looking at Blu-Ray? What do you want to accomplish?
Archiving my dvd’s. I bought quite a few guitar lessons on dvd and it’s an investment I need to protect. I have considered buying a 500 GB drive on sale and using it to archive. Unplug it and keep it in a drawer.
Blu-Ray would be a more easily accessible archive. Just pull it out of the media wallet and I’m good to go.
I just get nervous reading the reviews on Newegg. A lot of people are saying their Blu Rays go bad after 6 to 8 months. That would be devastating without another backup.
I lost a CD-r full of mag scans from Usenet a few years ago. I felt physically sick to my stomach. It had taken over a year to put that collection together. Back when postings on Usenet often dropped files. You had to beg people for fills. You had to trade for fills. It was time consuming. A whole year of work wiped out by a POS disc that went bad in a cd wallet.
I need to see what sales they have for a 500 GB drive. That’s small by todays standards but perfect for backing up DVD’s and other video. Then I’d have a double backup. Blu Ray discs and a physical hard drive unplugged and stored in a drawer.
I wonder how USB transfers compare to direct SATA transfers? I think my pc is USB 2. USB 3 just came out in the past couple years.
I’ve often just removed my pc cover and plugged the hd into the sata channel. I may need to consider an external solution. Newegg sells drive and enclosure combos.
I don’t trust optical media for any long term storage, I’ve been bitten too many times before. I would suggest you rather copy the data to a couple of external harddrives. It is more expensive but I think it is more reliable.
If reliability is your end goal, you want to look at RAID or a ssd. Even CD’s are a relatively new technology in archival terms–there’s no guarantees they’ll age well. DVD’s are even newer, and Blu Ray newer still. It’s hard to say how well they’ll hold up down the road.
Also, I think you’re seriously underestimating the hassle of having your files split between two dozen Blu Ray discs.
It’s pretty screwed up that there’s not a safe and reliable way to burn files to a optical disc and store them away. They should be just like a factory dvd or audio cd. I have audio cd’s from 1986 that still play perfectly. DVD’s from 1994 are still fine. Somehow discs burned at the factory are reliable.
I will hedge my bets with both a blu ray back up and a hard drive backup. By backup, I don’t mean a full backup of windows. I’m just copying my video and dvd files. Also about 30 gig of music I ripped from my own audio cd’s.