blu-ray - anyone using to store?

[stewarthemley]

I have loads of DVDs cluttering up the place and wondered if anyone is using blu-ray to store images yet? Blu-ray writers are going for about £125 in the UK and for that price it seems to make reasonable sense, although I have only seen PC compatibility mentioned and not Mac (at that price).

[PeterAit]

I have loads of DVDs cluttering up the place and wondered if anyone is using blu-ray to store images yet? Blu-ray writers are going for about £125 in the UK and for that price it seems to make reasonable sense, although I have only seen PC compatibility mentioned and not Mac (at that price).

A dual layer BR disk holds 50GB and costs about $25, right? a 1.5 terabyte hard disk holds 30 times as much and costs about $150. Nuff said!

Peter

[stewarthemley]

A dual layer BR disk holds 50GB and costs about $25, right? a 1.5 terabyte hard disk holds 30 times as much and costs about $150. Nuff said!

Peter

I agree Peter at the moment but it might get closer if BR discs drop in price the same way CDs and then DVDs did - BR rewriters too.

As well as loads of DVDs, I'm reluctantly building up a collection of hard drives but I just don't trust them to last. I always have that fear that when I start one up it's going to fail. And then I have the pain of retrieving all that info - if I can. At least with a DVD you know it will work and if the player fails, well they're almost as cheap as a BR disc now!

[Farmer]

I agree Peter at the moment but it might get closer if BR discs drop in price the same way CDs and then DVDs did - BR rewriters too.

As well as loads of DVDs, I'm reluctantly building up a collection of hard drives but I just don't trust them to last. I always have that fear that when I start one up it's going to fail. And then I have the pain of retrieving all that info - if I can. At least with a DVD you know it will work and if the player fails, well they're almost as cheap as a BR disc now!

Optical media has a higher failure rate than hard drives and so long as the drive isn't physically damaged, it's unlikely that you'll be unable to have a forensic recovery performed (in a worst-case scenario).

As hard drive (or eventually, whatever replaces them) become bigger and cheaper, you consolidate your old ones into single, newer ones, thereby rewriting the data and keeping it on up to date technology.  It's so much faster and easier than optical media, too.

No media is perfect, but please don't be mislead to think that DVD or BR is automatically going to work just because you haven't touched it for years.

[digitaldog]

A dual layer BR disk holds 50GB and costs about $25, right? a 1.5 terabyte hard disk holds 30 times as much and costs about $150. Nuff said!

Make sense and one reason I've been very reluctant to buy such a driver for storage. These days, I find I have more than ample "smaller" drives after upgrading so I just use those. Redundancy is key too (IOW, two HD's that are identical seem safer than one DVD).

FWIW, I picked up one of these Newer Tech Voyagers and it works quite well for this task: http://www.newertech.com/products/voyagerq.php

If and when these dual's sell for $5, then I might bite.

[JeffKohn]

50GB BD+R's are still very expensive, but the 25GB discs are under $4 each now and LG has a burner out for under $200. I recently picked one up, because while I agree that hard drives are good for backup, I wouldn't want to rely on just hard drives. Even a HD sitting in the closet when you're not using it can seize up and fail.

I use a raid-5 array for my online image storage, and back that up to offline HD backup periodically as well. But I also backup the files from a shoot to DVD/BD as a second level of protection. The optical media are a little more convenient to use and manage, and will likely last much longer sitting in your closet/safe  than a HD.

[jonathan.lipkin]

Any updates on this? BR discs have come down in price so they're only around $1 each.

[Farmer]

Hard drives are bigger, faster and cheaper, too, and digital images have grown in average size with new hardware whereas BR is a fixed capacity.

I don't see the benefit of using optical media which has a higher failure rate, is slower, and has much less capacity as a general backup medium.

[jonathan.lipkin]

Perhaps you're right- every few years I want to re-evaluate my workflow. I've been using a backup strategy that archives images on live HDD storage, two offline copies also on HDD and one additional copy on optical media. This was based on a workflow developed by Peter Krogh a few years ago in The DAM (digital asset management) Book.

On the dpbestflow.com site (sponsored by ASMP), Krogh writes:
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We advocate a 3-2-1 backup strategy for the Archive. There should be a minimum of three copies of each file, stored on two different media types, and one copy should be stored off-site. Optical disc or digital tape could be used for your second medium. For some photographers, a second medium is too difficult to implement, usually due to very large shooting volume. For these photographers, we suggest the third copy be a hard drive copy that is treated like write-once media. We’ve outlined a strategy for this in the Backup section.
--------
One advantage of optical media that I can think of is that it does not need to be powered up. From what I've been told, HDDs can fail if not spun up every once in a while. Don't know what this interval is. Also not sure this is true. The reasoning is that the spindles need to turn in order to distribute the lubricant? I've worked on cars that sat for decades, and never found a hub or bearing that froze.

[David S]

I agree that blu-ray costs more than the equivalent HD but there is the advantage that you have several disks so that even if one fails, the rest of the collection is OK.
I use both HD and blu-ray for off-site storage.

As a comment on disk life - I have CDs from the early 80s with no problems, and DVDs for more than 15 years ago that are also fine. In fact, just found some missing shots from 1995 (scans) that were fine.

Dave S

[mmurph]

Hard disks for me too.

I have a small Unix based NAS with 6 TB. Basicallty a low end CPU box that runs off a 256K flash drive.  I have 4, 1.5 TB drives in it. 

Multiple Raid configurations.  Designed to stay on for hours, days at a time. Can access remotely via a web interface.  Basic cost for the box now is less than $150, plus the drives.

Archive off of that to off-line drives.  A self-contained 3 TB Western Digital disk was less than $150.

I still have at least 20, 160 GB +- drives floating around that I can slide into a case like Andrew posted above. Every time I stage a new system I make a clean image to one of the disks. Every time I decommission or restage a laptop, etc I make a clean image to the disk. Just in case, Throw a label on and throw it on the shelf.

So that is 3 basic levels of storage: Raid backup of all my computers online (6-9, depening on how you count - kids box, etc.), large 1 TB to 3TB near line, 160 GB to 200GB offline.

[Farmer]

Dave S. - no doubt some discs survive very well and most survive reasonably well, but I've seen some delaminate that were unopened in a draw in a jewel case after just 2 years.  That's rare, but it does happen and overall you're more likely to find a problem than not.  Plus, it's just so very slow.

If it's working for you, all good :-)

[David S]

Dave S. - no doubt some discs survive very well and most survive reasonably well, but I've seen some delaminate that were unopened in a draw in a jewel case after just 2 years.  That's rare, but it does happen and overall you're more likely to find a problem than not.  Plus, it's just so very slow.

If it's working for you, all good :-)

Agree completely. Of course, I also know that HDs can fail in a short time occasionally. So I have concluded that there is no perfect solution except multiple solutions. Speed is an issue but I can burn a single blu-ray disk as needed in just a few minutes for off-site. Sure HD is faster but then I have to go and get the HD, bring it to the computer, copy and take it back - much more time.

Cheers,

Dave S

[jonathan.lipkin]

The issue for me is redundancy. All media - HD, optical media, tapes, paper, chalkboards - is going to fail eventually. The trick is to have multiple copies so that if (I mean when) one copy fails, there is another copy. I don't think it's a good idea to make a copy then file it away and assume it will be readable in a decade. Archived data needs to be verified occaisionally. I'm still trying to work out a good method to do this. Image Verifier is a good program, but it has a .5% false positive rate for corrupted files. With 100k images to verify, I get 500 reported as corrupt.

[dreed]

I used to use DVDs for backups but last year started using BluRay.

They're the "offline" backup. This is duplicated.

I also keep a backup on disk.

Failure concerns...

I have friends that burnt CDs during the 1990s that are now failing. I expect that DVDs and BluRays will have a similar life expectancy. In terms of media format, I am not worried. BluRays can read DVDs/CDs, DVD's can read CDs. Thus far everything has been backward compatible. If you're going to use media such as this, you might want to periodically replace it or check that it is still in good shape.

For electronics, such as hard drives, the first problem is being able to connect them. If you've only got backups on disconnected bare PATA drives then it may be difficult to find working USB enclosures in a few years. Try finding something to connect non-SAS SCSI devices from 10 years ago! In another 15 years maybe SATA will be on the way out.

Once you've got it connected, the next issue you face is the aging of the electronic components, such as capacitors. It is well known that capacitors degrade over time - especially when they remain unused for extended periods of time. Hard drives that are used in this manner should be replaced every 5 years or so to guard against failure of capacitors.

Use of RAID is not a backup, it is just a way to provide higher availability and reliability for disk storage.

If you're looking for long term offline storage then the answer really is tape. Yes. it is expensive but that is what you'll find your bank and government using.

[Farmer]

I think everyone is really on the same page - you need multiple backups and you need at least one off site.

Personally, I have a local HDD copy, a NAS RAID copy locally, an offisite copy on HDD (not RAID - I need it to work on any system) and I'm using Crashplan for a cloud based, off site, solution (which is great, btw - service has been excellent).

That's good enough for me - if all of those go at once, I have other problems :-)