[mythtv-users] Anyone archiving to Blu-Ray Disks?

[Jeff Walther]

> Date: Thu, 08 Jul 2010 09:47:23 -0400
> From: Raymond Wagner <raymond at wagnerrp.com>

> On 7/8/2010 09:07, John Drescher wrote:
>> On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 8:58 AM, Brian Wood<beww at beww.org>  wrote:
>>
>>> On Wednesday, July 07, 2010 10:28:38 pm Nick Rout wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 3:54 PM, John Drescher<drescherjm at gmail.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>> Maybe 1st calculate the cost of storage per GB and compare that to
>>>>>> hard-disk.
>>>>>>
>>>>> That is a big problem. 2TB hard drives can be had for $110 now which
>>>>> is way way cheaper per GB than blue ray will be for a long long time.
>>>>>
>> After posting I saw a couple of $3 BD-R disks on newegg. They have a
>> caution about what drives support them but this may reduce the cost.
>>
>
> That's still twice the cost of a hard drive, in addition to requiring a
> burner.  You still have to take into account hidden costs, like your
> personal time.

A few weeks ago meritline.com had a ten pack of 25GB 4X BDR disks for $10.
 Now they're $14 or a 30 pack for $37.  I'm not sure if shipping is still
free.

That's either less than or right at that cost per GB for a 2 TB drive. 
And it will probably fall from there, but so will hard drives.

> Now consider burning that to BD-Rs.  A 10xCAV drive is probably going to
> take about 12 minutes to burn, or 15 including lead in/out.  Add in a
> couple minutes per disk to swap them, and set up the files to burn.
> You're looking at a full 24 hours of your time to burn all that data,
> compared to maybe 10 minutes using a hard drive backup, and that's not
> giving any form of redundancy.

This is the real problem.  With DVDs so cheap, I've considered building a
box of four or eight DVD-RW drives and using something like Retrospect to
perform backup.  Retrospect will automatically fill the next available
media after the first one fills.  So, with such a box, one would only need
to attend to it every few hours.

However, data sizes have already overtaken DVD media sizes.  A similar box
could be built with blue ray drives, but the drives are still too
expensive.

Still, it's nice to have removable media so that one can easily make
multiple redundant backups and store one or more off site.  It also allows
one to have archive copies for various years.

For years I used DAT DDS2 (4 GB tapes) for backup.   I was going to switch
to DDS3 (12GB tape) and autoloaders (HP makes a nice little six tape
autoloader).  The autoloaders were well under $100 each on the used
market, but between when I planned it and when I would have executed the
capacity needs grew so much it doesn't seem so practical any more.  And
the tapes are considerably more expensive, and probably less reliable than
optical media.   Although, I"ve only had one tape DAT tape fail on me
since I started using it back in 1993.  Regular cleaning makes all the
difference with DAT...

Jeff Walther