What type blu ray disks for archiving?

[y3llowduk]

I'm looking at getting some blu ray disks to archive some old family pictures and videos onto. What's the most appropriate format? I'm finding the different types quite confusing... 

 

Tia.

[emosun]

You might wanna archive to something more future proof as blu-ray media won't be as accessible as say a solid state usb drive.

[y3llowduk]

4 minutes ago, emosun said:

You might wanna archive to something more future proof as blu-ray media won't be as accessible as say a solid state usb drive.

I didn't actually consider that.... do you mean like a 2.5 ssd in a USB enclosure kind of thing, or a flash usb drive? What's the longevity on SSD's?

[Guest Vin Eurodiesel]

If you really wanna go blu ray, get a good quality one from a reputable brand (Sony, Panasonic, TDK,...). But honestly I would just get a cheap reliable hard drive (Something along the lines of a WD Caviar Blue) they are going to last much longer than any form of flash memory or any form of disc. Also flash memory, without being powered on has a retention rate of 1-10 years.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, y3llowduk said:

I didn't actually consider that.... do you mean like a 2.5 ssd in a USB enclosure kind of thing, or a flash usb drive? What's the longevity on SSD's?

Id personally just get some mirrored hdds. THen check them every few years.

 

How much data do you need to storage?

[emosun]

2 minutes ago, y3llowduk said:

do you mean like a 2.5 ssd in a USB enclosure kind of thing, or a flash usb drive? What's the longevity on SSD's?

a flash drive or usb drive will work. with their low cost you can buy several and make copies.

longevity should be several years considering you wouldn't be using it ever. would just need to plug it in maybe every 3-4 years to make sure it retains the data but even then i've seen usb sticks hold data for a very long time.

[mariushm]

I would say none.

IMHO your best archiving solution is buying 2-3 hard drives and storing them in separate places, either running them 24/7 or turning them on and scanning the data every few months then back off. If one mechanical drive fails you can recover the data from the others.

 

You can get a solid 10 TB drive for $300 ... that's 3 cents per GB ...

 

Archival grade bluray discs (debatable) are around 60$ for 5 discs x 50 GB each... so 24 cents per GB: https://www.amazon.com/Archival-Verbatim-M-Disc-Inkjet-Printable/dp/B01B99WUR6

You can buy 3 x 300$ drives and STILL end up 3 times cheaper over the long term.

 

Sure, you could get cheaper blurays and make 2-3 copies of each bluray and store separately but they'll still bitrot and degrade in their boxes, so you'd have to copy back the data in 2-3 years... max 5 years...  and burn it again on fresh media

 

[y3llowduk]

Thanks for the suggestions guys, It's probably around 300GB so not a huge amount. It's the kind of data that I want to just dump onto something and forget about. If I were to store it on HDD's, I assume I'd need to spin them up every year or so to keep them moving? Also, how long do HDD's last when being used for this scenario?

[y3llowduk]

Allthough having said 300GB... that's likely to go up to a few TB in a year or so...

[y3llowduk]

2 minutes ago, mariushm said:

I would say none.

IMHO your best archiving solution is buying 2-3 hard drives and storing them in separate places, either running them 24/7 or turning them on and scanning the data every few months then back off. If one mechanical drive fails you can recover the data from the others.

 

You can get a solid 10 TB drive for $300 ... that's 3 cents per GB ...

 

Archival grade bluray discs (debatable) are around 60$ for 5 discs x 50 GB each... so 24 cents per GB: https://www.amazon.com/Archival-Verbatim-M-Disc-Inkjet-Printable/dp/B01B99WUR6

You can buy 3 x 300$ drives and STILL end up 3 times cheaper over the long term.

 

Sure, you could get cheaper blurays and make 2-3 copies of each bluray and store separately but they'll still bitrot and degrade in their boxes, so you'd have to copy back the data in 2-3 years... max 5 years...  and burn it again on fresh media

 

Ok, Just a bit of a faff having to spin them up every few months... seen as I'm going to be storing them at a different house. Did consider a NAS but the data I'm storing will only need to be accessed maybe once every 2-3 years so seems a bit wasteful.

[mariushm]

If you store the drive in a good environment (with some silica gen baggies for humidity and whatnot) they can last for 10+ years. In 10 years, the 10 TB drive will most likely be obsolete, like 160-250 GB drives are now.

 

At such low amount, you may also look into services like Amazon Glacier ... they charge around 0.4 cents per GB per month ... or 4$ per TB per month to store data... you upload data to their system, what's not accessed gets automatically transferred to magnetic tapes and stored for you.

 

[Dyaets]

IF you want to go with Blu-Rays, you can check M-Disks.Haven't used them myself so cannot tell on their longevity but according to Millenniata, a properly stored one can last 1000 years. Otherwise, I would still go for an additional copy somewhere else. Al already mentioned, AWS Glacier or Deep Archive have low cost for storage but retrieval won't be cheap. Also, here is some good reading on different backup media pros and cons: https://www.hyper-v.io/keep-backups-lets-talk-backup-storage-media/