Blu-ray Discs for Backup
[by Peter Krogh]
Consider Blu-ray disks as an way to backup your files. The dpBestflow project recommends that write-once media, such as CD, DVD or Blu-ray disk can provide needed protection for your valuable images. Many people feel that DVD is just too small, at 4 GB, to be worth the hassle. Blu-ray can hold 23 GB. Burners cost less than $200, and discs can be found for as little as $3 each. Read more here.
7 Responses to 'Blu-ray Discs for Backup'
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You confirmed my need for Blu-ray. Especially if I can find inexpensive disks. Thanks for the info!
I am somewhat trepidatious of optical disk storage due to the occurrence of disk failures. I have lost some images over the years on CD and DVD because the disk fails. No scratches, or there are scratches, but whatever reason, they fail. I just get more external drives, and backups for them. I know hard drives fail too, but I have a double redundancy for each drive, and feel much safer as a result. Even the D65 workshop leans away from optical disks. Hard drives haven’t changed in decades, while optical storage seems to change or tweak every few years.
Also, a player is $200. 15 discs are $59 at Best Buy, which gives you 325GB. A Western Digital USB 2.0 drive is $109 for 1TB. You could almost buy three of them for the initial cost of the Blu Ray investment, and have a faster reading drive as a result. Just sayin.
Scott,
Yes, you can get hard drives cheap, but we’re trying to think of risk in context. If you only use hard drive, then you leave yourself open to several kinds of risk without protection. Write-once media simply protects against some things that hard disk does not. (It’s pretty well outlined on the dpBestflow.org site, so I won’t repeat here.)
So, it comes down to your tolerance for risk. Blu-ray media can be bought for about about $120/Terabyte – not significantly more than hard drive. What are your pictures worth? How much would you pay to recover them if lost? (And, of course, what is your time worth?)
As a side note, I saw a movie where Seth describes the total corruption of every single connected hard drive in his system. If that had happened at a time when he was updating or validating his offsite backup drives, it could have meant the total loss of the collection. The possibility of stuff like that happening is one reason I strongly recommend optical disk as part of a backup strategy.
Just sayin.
Peter
Scott,
Also take a look at the validation section of the dpBestflow.org website. I suggest validation of all data, but optical disk is one place where you can validate with total certainty. If you do this periodically, then you’re likely to find problems as they are are starting to happen.
This is also important for hard drives.
Peter
Those are good points. I used to tout DVDs but lost too much data when I went that route before I bought in to hard drives. I’ve heard arguements on both sides, and I am grateful for the new dpBestflow site.
I’m just speaking from personal experience. I keep a mirror array off grid of drives that match my on grid array. It was more expensive on the onset, but I have had too many failed optical disks in my life, far more than hard drives, then to want to put all my apples in one basket. Once, in the beginning of my career, I had backed up all my photos on floppy and CDs from my first two newspapers. Then, all of a sudden, they couldn’t be read, and now I have a couple years of news work I can never get back. There weren’t even scratches on the CD, it just didn’t work.
Having said that, I will consider buying a blu-ray to perhaps add a second back up to my existing backup. I know the adage that hard drives will eventually fail, but I don’t think optical disks are any better. So if you can work as many levels of backup into your workflow, the better off you are. You can never have enough, I guess.
Scott,
Actually, you *can* have too many backups (or at least, you can have so many unorganized backups that they start to make the data less safe, since restoring the archive might be a more confusing process.)
If you are going to skip Optical disk (and plenty of people do), I’d strongly suggest that you get an additional set of hard drives. Keep a set offsite, and rarely update files on those drives (you can *add* files to the drive, but *updating* the files removes a lot of the protection they provide.) This offsite set can be your disaster recovery copy.
A set of drives can live on-site, and be updated periodically. These are the protection against drive failure, rather than disaster recovery.
Peter