[mythtv-users] Options for Backing up Myth data

Raymond Wagner raymond at wagnerrp.com
Thu Dec 9 16:43:45 UTC 2010


On 12/9/2010 11:27, Brian Wood wrote:
> On Thursday, December 09, 2010 09:16:59 am Raymond Wagner wrote:
>> On 12/9/2010 10:03, Brian Wood wrote:
>>> On Wednesday, December 08, 2010 08:56:35 pm Raymond Wagner wrote:
>>>> On 12/8/2010 22:30, Brian Wood wrote:
>>>>> On Wednesday, December 08, 2010 06:07:20 pm Dave Badia wrote:
>>>>> Or folks are using some other option
>>>> Flash drives are simply more convenient, and while smaller than
>>>> BD-Rs, still offer plenty of space for most people.  The fact that
>>>> they are read/writable on just about any computer also makes them
>>>> far more useful.
>>> Flash drives are OK for documents and photos, but they are pretty
>>> much useless for any significant amount of video, especially HD.
>>> The amount of data you can store on a flash drive is about what is
>>> practical to store online.
>> To be fair, bulk storage of HD video isn't something 'normal' people
>> generally have to concern themselves with.  Personally, the amount of
>> data you can store on a Bluray disk just isn't practical for bulk
>> storage.  For a couple home videos, it's fine.  If you intend to back
>> up your entire, multi-TB collection, there is a time component
>> involved that you're not considering.  With a hard drive or tape
>> drive, you tell it to copy, and you come back half a day and several
>> TB later.  With Bluray, you're going to have to keep coming back
>> every 20-30 minutes to swap disks, and you have to do that 80+ times
>> to equal one large hard drive.  My time is just worth more than
>> that.
> That same argument would apply to flash drives, since flash units larger
> than 32GB (or even 16) are prohibitively expensive, and need to be
> changed as well.
>
> The problem with hard drives is once removed from a system they are
> extremely fragile, as was pointed out earlier.
>
> Tape systems are beyond what most consumers want to spend, especially if
> you include a SCSI controller.

My point was that most people who aren't doing video are perfectly 
content with the 4-16GB of commonly available flash drives.  People 
aren't using BD-Rs because the average user doesn't need that much 
space.  Flash drives are much easier, and in the volume they need, much 
cheaper.

Just because you can drop an optical disk without risk of damage doesn't 
mean they're reliable.  I've tried recovering from CDs and DVDs before.  
At a couple years age, DVDs were somewhere around 75-80% readable, and 
CDs were something far less.  I don't expect BD-Rs to be any different.  
The organic dyes fade over time, and that's assuming they haven't died 
already from a seal breach.  If you want a reliable archive, you're 
going to need multiple copies, and you're going to need to cycle in 
fresh media at some interval on the order of a few years.  Burning that 
volume of BD-Rs repeatedly is not a proposition I'm interested in.  I'd 
rather take my chances that I don't drop the hard drive.



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