M-Disc for data back up? Optical may not be dead after all.

Regular HTL type BD-R discs are good for up to 100 years, and I pay about $20 for 50pk for those. I figure something better will come along before then and I can migrate it to the new tech. Surely there won't be any BD-R drives in 1000 years anyway!

Regular 25GB discs are single layer and less error prone to burn, so that's what I use. It did take a long time to burn the last decade, but now I just do an annual archive which is maybe 2 hours of time swapping discs while I watch a movie. It's nice to have read only copy that is not susceptible to flood, electric problems, or viruses.

Two issues:

1) What's the time required to write 100 GB? Optical has always been much slower than magnetic storage and even 100 GB isn't all that much in today's world.

2) Optical reader are becoming less common so being able to read you disc in even 10 years is not a given unless you stock up on drives. SATA will likely be long gone in a decade but hopefully you'll be able to connect a USB 2.0/3.0 device to a USB Type E port with an adapter.

mike_d wrote in post #18431760
Two issues:

1) What's the time required to write 100 GB? Optical has always been much slower than magnetic storage and even 100 GB isn't all that much in today's world.

2) Optical reader are becoming less common so being able to read you disc in even 10 years is not a given unless you stock up on drives. SATA will likely be long gone in a decade but hopefully you'll be able to connect a USB 2.0/3.0 device to a USB Type E port with an adapter.

I would gladly give up speed for permanence. The disk can just burn overnight if necessary. Or it can take a week. Doesn't matter to me.

Obsolescence of optical devices is an issue, but there will probably still be quite a few of these things around in 10-20 years. I still have a 3.5" floppy drive here in one of my computers, and that technology is 30 years old.

Archibald wrote in post #18431818
I would gladly give up speed for permanence. The disk can just burn overnight if necessary. Or it can take a week. Doesn't matter to me.

Obsolescence of optical devices is an issue, but there will probably still be quite a few of these things around in 10-20 years. I still have a 3.5" floppy drive here in one of my computers, and that technology is 30 years old.

Speed still matters if you need to backup more than 1 disc's worth of data. Media spanning has always been a problem.

I think I still have some 3.5" floppies too. But I only have one PC old enough to have a floppy interface on the motherboard. Don't forget about 5.25" floppies which aren't much older. I haven't been able to read one of those in nearly 20 years.

mike_d wrote in post #18431868
I think I still have some 3.5" floppies too. But I only have one PC old enough to have a floppy interface on the motherboard. Don't forget about 5.25" floppies which aren't much older. I haven't been able to read one of those in nearly 20 years.

My 3 1/2" floppy is USB.

I still have a loose 5 1/4" drive around, just in case, but I don't know if it could be installed in any of my machines.

mike_d wrote in post #18431760
Two issues:

1) What's the time required to write 100 GB?

Answer = Much slower than magnetic storage. Much much slower. This is a caveat one must accept to use optical.

Indeed, all these issues have been a huge part of why I personally abandoned optical storage back years ago.

However, the idea of storage that actually will last, so using it is less of a repetitive task,. might make it much more appealing again. (to me anyway)

We have people in every back up thread on the forum recommending online cloud storage. If slow internet connections are acceptable means of backing up, than burning 100GB optical disks should be valid as well from a speed stand point.

In my case I am considering adding optical disks as part of my back up again. (Haven't done so since about 2007)
I will still rely on hard drives more,. for speed and cost per GB and overall convenience.
But again, optical discs are not susceptible to all kinds of possible disasters that magnetic media is. Including accidental overwrite, EMP or other magnetic erasure, head crashes, physical motor problems and on and on...

tkbslc wrote in post #18431482
Regular HTL type BD-R discs are good for up to 100 years, and I pay about $20 for 50pk for those.

So this is new to me also,. I gave up on optical before BR was really an option of any sort.
The appeal is that the M-Disk appears to be the real deal. The promise of longer lasting CD-R and DVD-R was a weak one, and once you realize that many of your disks are no longer readable, you lose faith.

Do I need a thousand years? No but f the US nave says it's a fact than I can rest assured they WILL last 30.

With any other optical, I'm not so sure.

I'll look into HTL as well. My question is why has no one ever seemed to recommend this on the forum in all our back up strategy threads? Is it really trusted?

CyberDyneSystems wrote in post #18431889
We have people in every back up thread on the forum recommending online cloud storage. If slow internet connections are acceptable means of backing up, than burning 100GB optical disks should be valid as well from a speed stand point.

That's a valid point except that online backups are mostly "set and forget". Backing up to any small-ish medium means playing "data tetris" as you attempt to fit folders of varying sizes onto a medium while minimizing wasted space.

mike_d wrote in post #18432016
That's a valid point except that online backups are mostly "set and forget". Backing up to any small-ish medium means playing "data tetris" as you attempt to fit folders of varying sizes onto a medium while minimizing wasted space.

Yeah , that's true... I'd forgotten those games that I used to play with DVDs.

CyberDyneSystems wrote in post #18431895
So this is new to me also,. I gave up on optical before BR was really an option of any sort.
The appeal is that the M-Disk appears to be the real deal. The promise of longer lasting CD-R and DVD-R was a weak one, and once you realize that many of your disks are no longer readable, you lose faith.

Do I need a thousand years? No but f the US nave says it's a fact than I can rest assured they WILL last 30.

With any other optical, I'm not so sure.

I'll look into HTL as well. My question is why has no one ever seemed to recommend this on the forum in all our back up strategy threads? Is it really trusted?

HTL are regular BD-R discs. There was another cheap type that used a cheaper ink-based technology called LTH. Those were the ones everyone had problems with. I wouldn't buy any BD-R unless they say HTL, but that's 95% or more of the discs sold today.

I just figured since optical is my 4th copy of my data, and only there for horrible emergencies, that it probably didn't warrant going too crazy on the paranoia with the M-discs.

Just a note on the 50 and 100GB discs - I was reading a review of them, and the reviewer noted how sad it was when he burned a coaster with $20 media that took close to 2 hours to burn...

Archibald wrote in post #18431877
My 3 1/2" floppy is USB.

I still have a loose 5 1/4" drive around, just in case, but I don't know if it could be installed in any of my machines.

Yeah, you can still get a USB 3.5" floppy drive for $12 on ebay. That's a medium that was launched in 1982! It's 35 already. BD-R is only 10 years old, so I'm not too worried yet.

For 5.25 (41 years old), you'd just have to find a little bit older computer with a floppy controller that will still boot and then copy 5.25 to 3.5 (or even USB or network file sharing depending on the computers capabilities and age). If you had a 5.25" floppy that had grandpa's only copy of his will or a letter from your mom or something, it would be worth the effort to see if it could be read. Odds are it would be just fine if the floppy was stored semi-properly.

tkbslc wrote in post #18432194
...

Just a note on the 50 and 100GB discs - I was reading a review of them, and the reviewer noted how sad it was when he burned a coaster with $20 media that took close to 2 hours to burn...

Yes, this has me worried too.
I always buy in bulk, the "cake box" but this time I only bought one. It will either work flawlessly, or it will be the last one I ever buy. I figured it was worth a try.

Now I need to break out the calculator to see how many 25GB discs I would need for a full burn of my photo archive....


over 100 discs if I use 25GB
about 25 discs if I can use 100gb.

My disks arrived today.

Verbatim 25GB M Disc BD-R:
Wrote about 23GB to it, took 16 minutes to burn.

Then I tried the 100GB 4 layer "BDXL" disk, also Verbatim M-Disk. 94GB of data.
Took about an hour and half. Verifying now,. fingers crossed.

The drive came bundled with a watered down Nero that wants me to buy stuff.
Nero's rating was below many freeware, so I am using "imgburn" for these first tests.
So far I like it, but am not a huge fan of aspects of the interface.

Apparently it takes a while to read/verify a 94GB 4 layer BD-R
The burn was verified and is readable in the drive that made it!

Unfortunately, we do not have a 2nd Bluray compatible optical drive in the house that I can use to see if anything other than the writing drive reads it. I don't think i even have one at work.

CyberDyneSystems wrote in post #18432722
Unfortunately, we do not have a 2nd Bluray compatible optical drive in the house that I can use to see if anything other than the writing drive reads it. I don't think i even have one at work.

we resorted to using a PS4 on the weekend to view a movie (Peter Jackson's King Kong) that one of the boys had bought a couple of weeks back. Seemed like everything needed a software update before it would co-operate. Eventually persistence won...

On the topic of eternal backups, I suspect having media that functions long after the media reading devices (or interface connections) are long since obsolete & unavailable isn't going to achieve the desired result...

CyberDyneSystems wrote in post #18432722
Unfortunately, we do not have a 2nd Bluray compatible optical drive in the house that I can use to see if anything other than the writing drive reads it. I don't think i even have one at work.

Do you have a blu-ray player (for movies)? Those will display jpg, but if you have all RAW probably won't help.