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Sunday, October 12, 2014

Blu-Ray for Data Archiving?

I've been looking around for some time now for new methods of backing up or archiving data.

At the moment, my main machine has 2 1 Terra byte hard drives and one 3 TB external drive. Aside from this I have an DVD RW which used to be my backup device but given the sheer volume of files on my PC, clearly, I need something more than the 4.7 or even 9 GB that my DVD RW can provide.

I did install a Seagate 4 TB NAS but like all hard drives, it was destined to get filled up. After all, this drive is serving up this family's voracious appetite for multimedia especially movies in HD and audio encoded in FLAC.

The ideal setup right now I think would be to have 3 individual NAS ( for now ) with one dedicated to movies, another dedicated to music and one dedicated to data such as photos and videos. Later on, I should probably look in to a NAS that is setup for RAID but for now, I think valuable data is best archived on safer media since these NAS's and external HDs are merely hard drives that will fail someday.

I had resigned myself to buying a Blu-Ray writer and just schedule backups of my backups every few years. This is because of my worries regarding CD rot. So I checked out my favorite PC parts dealers site and I ran into this drive:

The Asustek Blu-Ray BW16D1HT

http://www.asus.com/Optical_Drives/BW16D1HT/overview/

 I checked the specs and was pleasantly surprised at two things:

1. The max capacity of 128 GB for BD XL discs

2. The M Disc that boasts of a 1000 YEAR life!

http://www.mdisc.com/

I don't know about you but I think I have finally found my new Data Archive that should be good for at least a decade.

For now the M Disc has a max capacity of 25 GB which of course is just a fifth of what the BD XL gives but thats still more than 3X that of a dual layer DVD.

Here's a video about M Discs in case you're interested to learn more about this format:


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