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I'm considering moving from DVD-Rs to Blu-Ray Recordable disks to backup my data. I don't have any experience with BD-Rs as of yet, though, and I wonder if it's worth it or I should wait another year or two.
I clearly remember that when DVDs were still the new thing you could reasonably expect a 20% coaster rate, and after one, maybe two years a lot of successfully recorded disks became totally or partially unreadable. Same thing happened years before with CD-Rs.
Considering that as of January 2012 the price of a single BD-R hovers around $2.40, and considering that I need at least 200 of them to move my data, I'm now treading lightly.
I'd appreciate to hear from someone who made the switch and can speak from experience.
As an aside, the cost per gigabyte of BD-Rs seems to be only slightly higher than DVD-Rs': $0.096 for BD-Rs (25 / $2.40) and ~$0.070 for DVD-Rs (4.3 / $0.3). The higher density of BD-Rs, in my opinion, compensates for the slightly higher price. Still, reliability comes first.
Yudo
Posted 2012-01-15T17:56:59.940
Reputation: 131
Update about hard disks:
Answers so far have been of the "the heck with BD-R, use hard disks" kind or "permanent backup is a myth". So let me clarify my position on both. First off, I know, "permanent" is really not permanent. When I say that, I mean 5-10 years. Technology marches on. Now, hard disks: I approach them with paranoia, because they fail often and unpredictably. For instance: last year I bought two 1.5TB Seagates. Filled them with the most accessed data, kept one online, the other stashed away. The one kept online failed within three months. – Yudo – 2012-01-15T19:34:59.343
2If used properly, hard drives can be very reliable. The key to success is using them in a redundant array, where depending on the setup, one or two discs can fail without any data loss. One good way to achieve this is to create a RAIDZ or a RAIDZ2 array with ZFS. You can set up your workstation to periodically check the integrity of the stored data, so if a drive was failing you would have time to react and replace it, without losing data. – phil – 2012-01-15T20:05:50.677
1I've eaten three hard drives in the last two years, and my data is still safer in my opinion than if I were to write them every three to five years to DVD or BD. I have around 4TB of data, mirrored across at least two drives at a time. It's a manual RAID1, for lack of a better definition, not perfect by any means, but it's still more reliable than the BD scenario. I tried reading a CD-R I burnt in 2006 and it saw the files, but I couldn't read them. – None – 2012-01-16T04:34:47.437
@RandolphWest: I've gone through at least 6, if we take into account the refurbished manure that Seagate kept sending as a replacement, which itself had to be replaced within two months. Eventually the combined shipping cost was approaching the cost of a new drive (seriously), so I stopped sending them back. That's why I feel kinda paranoid. However yes, all things considered the BD scenario seems to have more cons than pros. I think I'll ultimately stick to what I am doing right now (manual RAID1 is a great definition, actually!) and get some more drives as soon as prices drop. – Yudo – 2012-01-16T08:22:00.323
If I can suggest anything, it is to avoid Seagate. That said, Western Digital Blue snf Green drives haven't been behaving at all well lately, leaving the Black ones which are pricier. – None – 2012-01-17T01:11:08.057
@RandolphWest: Yep, I doubt my next hard disk will be a Seagate. In my experience, however, WDs have been quite unreliable as well. Last year I bought a small 320Gb Caviar for my father and it lasted a whopping 30 minutes. Almost DOA. The only brand I had excellent experiences with so far has been Samsung, oddly enough. I have one 1 TB HDD I bought a bit more than 3 years ago and it's still going, but their HDD department has been bought by...Seagate. – Yudo – 2012-01-18T18:21:14.597