When HN users recommended it
2 HN users recommended this between 2021 and 2024, in 2 comments.
20072026
Each tall tick is one HN user's first recommendation. A short tick is the same user again. Click a tick to jump to the comment.
2 HN users recommended this between 2021 and 2024, in 2 comments.
Each tall tick is one HN user's first recommendation. A short tick is the same user again. Click a tick to jump to the comment.
Someone pointed me to these [1], M-Disk, 25 pack of 100GB for around $260. That last for 1000 years. Probably some marketing numbers but I will be happy even if it was 100 years. It is still on my research list I have look at how and why it works and if they really that good in real life. But [2] seems to be reassuring.
I dont think the cost is expensive on a long term TCO. Assuming it really last that long. The problem is the time to burn those Data and they are practically not searchable.
I hope there are next gen storage, optical or not that brings larger data count and longer life cycle
I am thinking of a vague idea if there could be an NAS, where it has two drive, one for your local copy, the other one is used for storing bit and pieces of Data of similar brand of NAS from other users for recovery purposes.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Verbatim-98914-M-Disc-100GB-Surface/d...
[2] http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/indexmag.html?http://www...
Verbatim BDXL 100GB M-DISC 25 pack for $260.
https://www.amazon.com/Verbatim-98914-M-Disc-100GB-Surface/d...
$260 / 25 = $10.40/disc. $10.40 / 100 = $0.104/GB.
A decent 2TB HDD can be had for as low as like $60. $60/2000 = $0.03/GB. 10.4 / 3 = 3.46, so pretty far from 12x the cost. So realistically you could get three and a half-ish hard drives per gig compared to 100GB Blu-Rays.
I do agree, 100GB Blu-Rays do seem to be overpriced in some ways. I often end up using 25GB or 50GB discs as they're a lot cheaper and I often find I don't have another 100GB of data needing to backup. I mostly just wanted to point out its an option.
I wouldn't really compare them to hard drives in the end though. With optical media, its a disc that if stored even halfway decently will hold your data for longer than your great grandchildren's lives without needing to touch it or think about it again. A magnetic HDD has moving parts that will eventually wear out, magnetic surfaces that will lose their charge, need to be validated and re-checked and eventually copied over before failure. They're very physically resistant and very light weight. Dropping my CD case on the ground isn't likely to harm any of the data stored within, dropping a hard drive is likely to cause irrecoverable damage. Its way easier to mail to a distant family member to hold on to for long term distant storage. I can't easily mess up while copying the data and corrupt or delete it. The data is physically, permanently etched into the media. So no, I wouldn't say having 6 or 7 hard drives is more robust to having two burned Blu-Rays stored in two physically different locations in terms of trying to store the data for 50+ years.
There's a lot of things to like about using optical media for archival storage.
And yeah, if you're truly dealing with many dozens of TBs of storage you're needing to archive tape starts to make some sense, but I'd be more worried about procuring a tape drive able to read my tapes in 25+ years compared to finding some random Blu-Ray drive on eBay. Blu-Ray drives have been pretty mass market for a long time and will probably still be widely made for the next several years, meanwhile LTO drives are only really sold to enterprises in much smaller numbers. Also, lots of issues with backwards compatibility with LTO, so your options for getting the right drive is trickier. I'd imagine most home users are nowhere near there, and even a 25-50GB Blu-Ray a year/quarter would cover most of their data they actually care about.