Bluray for data backup ?

[mikerr]

Anyone doing this yet?

price per gig is less than hdd's

25GB BD-Rs @ £20 for a 50 pack - 1.6p/gig
50GB BD-Rs @ £72 for a 50 pack -3p/gig

100GB BD-Rs @ £34 for 5 pack - 7p/gig

compared to HDDs:

e.g WD Caviar 3TB @ £77 each - £77 - 3p/gig

[Joshimitsu91]

I don't do any back ups like this but my questions would be:

. Is that the cheapest HDD? Wouldn't 8TB Seagate archive ones work out a bit cheaper?
. How long is it going to take to fill 3TB of blu-rays by hand? What's the read/write speed like compared to HDDs?
. BD-Rs cannot be re-written like a hard drive can, depending on the frequency you change your data this could send the cost up drastically
. How much safer is your data on a disc than a hard drive? Assuming you don't keep your back ups in a tumble dryer

I know one thing for certain, my company still uses tapes...

[Lorem-Ipsum]

If you have a decent internet connection you'd be better off with cloud backups.

Personally I use a VPS with BTSync for my important stuff. I'm looking to move to crashplan though.

[TheMadDutchDude]

The price may be lower, but I value my time more than saving a few quid here and there.

I'd rather be reading/writing files at 100MBps and slash the time into a quarter of what it would be with the BRs.

Plus, it's far easier to have a single HDD with everything on it compared to 50 BR disks sitting around.

[mikerr]

An 8TB is still around the same 3p/gig


BD-RE are available and rewriteable, but are double the price of write once BD-R ( and like the archival nature of write once media)

Of course I use hdds for backup,
But 50-100GB is just about right for many of my datasets.

[andyn]

Sounds like a pain in the neck to use as a regular backup medium.

However for something like an infrequent archive of key data a blue-ray (preferably stored offsite) is very reasonable, as a compliment to a 'hot' backup schedule and a cloud solution. With the three combined (daily backup, cloud backup, offsite snapshots) you are about as covered as you can reasonably be.

[Seb.F]

Flash drives/Hard Drives/Cloud Backup

Only ones I use. No way would I feel like writing blurays, I don't even have a disc drive any more.

[Aaron]

Yeah I couldn't use Bluray.. I have around 1.3Tb of user files at work which I have to backup nightly, which even really removes the possibility of cloud backup.

For me, the only realistic way of doing it is to back up to a rotation of external hard drives. The ones that aren't active at that very moment are stored off site.

[andyn]

Yeah I couldn't use Bluray.. I have around 1.3Tb of user files at work which I have to backup nightly, which even really removes the possibility of cloud backup.

For me, the only realistic way of doing it is to back up to a rotation of external hard drives. The ones that aren't active at that very moment are stored off site.

You should be able to use some kind of incremental cloud backup scheme though? Unless you mean 1.3TB of NEW data each night?

[Aaron]

You should be able to use some kind of incremental cloud backup scheme though? Unless you mean 1.3TB of NEW data each night?

Thankfully not... But it's normally quite a lot - it still wouldn't be feasible to do an offsite cloud backup.

[phill]

Stick with hard drives Much better I have some 25Gb disks and I should have bought 50Gb instead as I can't fit all of my daughters pictures on one disk and she's only 3... lol

That said, 24Tb of backup storage.... Am I insane??