Blu Ray backups anyone ?

Dave Clee

Well, after considerable thought I am about to pull the trigger on an external Blu Ray 6X burner.. I know the media is still approx $13 per blank DVD but I can easily cover that in my fees.
My feeling is that 25 gigs capacity is perfect for my wedding photos and allows me to write to media and then store it..
I had given up on using normal DVD's for weddings as the 4 gig capacity was causing me alot of work burning multiple dvds. So I moved to a multi external drive setup.

Anyone out there using a Blu Ray burner to archive their photos ? If so how has that worked out for you ?

Cheers

Dave

David_S85

thread bump

mwgrice

David_S85 wrote:

thread bump

That sounds sort of like a "no" to me. I'd given it some thought for my personal use, but decided to wait until prices went down a bit. The downside of that is that I have burned a LOT of DVDs lately.

cmason

I do not have a blu-ray burner, and I likely will not get one. Here is my reasoning. Today, even the fastest DVD burners take a very long time to backup a full 4GB. A blu-ray can hold 50GB. A backup could likely take days to complete. The media today is $15 each.

Today, I can purchase a 500GB portable hard drive for $100-150. I can buy bulk 500GB harddrives for $50. I can make a full image of a 250GB hard drive in less than 4 hours, which I have done.

So for me, the economics of this support just buying hard drives, and storing them. This also makes it even easier to access archived images, as I simply mount the drive.

I currently have three copies of my Photos library, each on a 500GB drive. One is the working copy, a second is my primary backup, stored here at home. A third is another copy, stored offsite at my office. I also make a disk image of my Photo library, using Carbon Copy Cloner, and store this on a partition on my Time Machine hard drive. I make the disk image more frequently, as I do this to recover quickly from a hard drive failure.

BradfordBenn

We actually were having a discussion about this at work for doing offline backups. The reasons of burn speed/duration were already mentioned and that was one big fear. The other one was that we do not feel the Blu Ray is wide spread enough for us to use it effectively. Not everyone has one. There is also the other risk; one piece of bad media results in a much larger data loss.

David_S85

The 4GB barrier has me at wits. I won't buy larger than 4GB cards since I back each one up (first) to an archive DVD, before they are copied to my computer on HD's. It is my paranoia that I'd never backup the shots later if I didn't do this. Hey, this practice just works for me.

If I move to 8GB cards or larger, I'll be tempted to do DVD backups later and possibly lose the pics if a HD goes down. I'd love to have an outboard BR drive to burn to, but yes, they're dog slow and still too expensive. So I'll just live with 130-200 shots on a 4GB for now.

The all my eggs in one basket argument that I don't want too many images on one media (whether it be BR, DVD, or a huge card) for fear of loss... well, I used to think the same when I was using 128MB memory sticks. Haven't lost any (photo) data yet.

BradfordBenn

David_S85 wrote:

The 4GB barrier has me at wits. I won't buy larger than 4GB cards since I back each one up (first) to an archive DVD, before they are copied to my computer on HD's. It is my paranoia that I'd never backup the shots later if I didn't do this. Hey, this practice just works for me.

The key thing is to have a program that works for you, so that is a good thing. I will say that my burning software (both on Mac and Windows) will let me just select the data I want to back up and it will parse it across multiple media.

The all my eggs in one basket argument that I don't want too many images on one media (whether it be BR, DVD, or a huge card) for fear of loss... well, I used to think the same when I was using 128MB memory sticks. Haven't lost any (photo) data yet.

Agreed on that one for solid state media (flash based) but I have had CD/DVD failures unfortunately. Also one of the reasons I am doing offsite network storage for critical stuff.

Art Scott

All my back ups are on harddrives and all final jpgs are of course stored on SM........I am starting to try to recover all the "corrupt" brand new only handled twice (once to put into burner and once to check on second cd/dvd drive disks (cd's and dvd's) onto hdds.............nothing is absolutly safe......all media will fail at some point, but the odds of losing all my data across 3 drivs deep it next to improbable................I just do not trust disks that much.....not to mention that I just purchased my 1st 1.5tb external (Seagate Extreme) for under $200 tax and all........what would that cost in blu ray disks at $13/25 gigs..............around $520+ tax I do believe......that is several hdd's for me.

ian408

Hey Art, you might want to check the firmware on that Seagate drive. 1.5T drives have known issues.

mwgrice

cmason wrote:

I do not have a blu-ray burner, and I likely will not get one. Here is my reasoning. Today, even the fastest DVD burners take a very long time to backup a full 4GB. A blu-ray can hold 50GB. A backup could likely take days to complete. The media today is $15 each.

Today, I can purchase a 500GB portable hard drive for $100-150. I can buy bulk 500GB harddrives for $50. I can make a full image of a 250GB hard drive in less than 4 hours, which I have done.

So for me, the economics of this support just buying hard drives, and storing them. This also makes it even easier to access archived images, as I simply mount the drive.

I currently have three copies of my Photos library, each on a 500GB drive. One is the working copy, a second is my primary backup, stored here at home. A third is another copy, stored offsite at my office. I also make a disk image of my Photo library, using Carbon Copy Cloner, and store this on a partition on my Time Machine hard drive. I make the disk image more frequently, as I do this to recover quickly from a hard drive failure.

I don't think it takes that long to burn a Blu-Ray disk. I did a little searching on it, and times weren't that much longer than a DVD. For instance, one 2007 article burned a 25-GB disk in an hour and 45 minutes. That's probably improved since then. Assuming that Blu-Ray catches on, there will come a point at which it's economical enough to use as part of a personal backup strategy.

I'm personally leary of relying on any one type of media. Everything has its advantages and disadvantages. Hard drives are convenient and large, but are more prone to physical damage, corruption and plain old-fashioned erasure. DVDs are smaller, a pain to burn and have a variable lifetime (depending on brand, manufacture and handling), but can't be altered once they're burned. On-line storage is off site, large and somewhat convenient (depending on your bandwidth and storage needs), but you're at the mercy of someone else's competence, redundancy and solvency.

cmason

mwgrice wrote:

I'm personally leary of relying on any one type of media. Everything has its advantages and disadvantages. Hard drives are convenient and large, but are more prone to physical damage, corruption and plain old-fashioned erasure. DVDs are smaller, a pain to burn and have a variable lifetime (depending on brand, manufacture and handling), but can't be altered once they're burned. On-line storage is off site, large and somewhat convenient (depending on your bandwidth and storage needs), but you're at the mercy of someone else's competence, redundancy and solvency.

Can't disagree...but I also dont think having different kinds of media provide some inherent safety net. I simply can not imagine a situation where all my harddrives fail at the same time. They are independent hardware, and in different locations. In this case, I don't see how using DVD as a 'backup" has any advantages. Yes one hard drive can fail. Two hard drives is much more rare. I stopped using DVD simply because it was requiring so many DVD to backup the library, and using backup software that did incremental backups was a disaster....I found coruption of files, and also moving from Windows to Mac, means by old backups are unreadable. So I simply use straight file backup, rather than some proprietary software.

I think it more important to choose the method that makes sense to you, for whatever reason, and use it.

mwgrice

cmason wrote:

Can't disagree...but I also dont think having different kinds of media provide some inherent safety net. I simply can not imagine a situation where all my harddrives fail at the same time. They are independent hardware, and in different locations. In this case, I don't see how using DVD as a 'backup" has any advantages. Yes one hard drive can fail. Two hard drives is much more rare. I stopped using DVD simply because it was requiring so many DVD to backup the library, and using backup software that did incremental backups was a disaster....I found coruption of files, and also moving from Windows to Mac, means by old backups are unreadable. So I simply use straight file backup, rather than some proprietary software.

I think it more important to choose the method that makes sense to you, for whatever reason, and use it.

I hope you weren't taking that as criticism--I think your arrangement is fine. I don't have any trouble imagining situations where all your hard drives get toasted, though. The most likely would involve a situation where your backup isn't good at the remote location (user error, hard drive failure, theft, disaster, etc.). If something happens to the hard drives at home (fire, theft, flooding) before you notice or before you've had a chance to fix the problems at the remote location, you'll have data loss.

Is it that unlikely? I've seen it happen before. I've had business customers who discovered to their great dismay that their off-site backups are bad or incomplete. As you add copies (and locations), it becomes less likely.

Another possibility is just accidentally deleting a file you want to keep. If you're using something to take snapshots of your data, you'll be able to get it back--assuming you notice in time. There's usually a limit to the amount of snapshots and copies of deleted data you can reasonably keep backed up, though, so after a certain point you won't be able to recover that file.