The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/Hergrim on 2024-07-23 16:12:23.
EDIT: To be absolutely crystal clear, I'm not going to be using Blu Ray to back up tens of terabytes of data, I'm going to be building a NAS server and important/valuable/critical files (as well as my computer) will also be backed up to the cloud.
The last year or so I've been hit with a few reminders about how ephemeral the internet is and how some nostalgic media from my childhood never got a VHS/DVD release and only now exists because someone managed to record it on their TV back in the day. Some of it may not even exist on the internet anymore, living on in a couple of private hard drives (including a couple of mine).
Anyway, I've decided that I'm going to actually try backing up some of my physical media as well as duplicating some digital files, backing up my digital video library, archiving a few important websites (one of my favourites is only now running on an unreliable mirror), backing up my audiobooks and the like. This will be going on the NAS I'm planning on building, and I'm still thinking about how I'll do large scale cold storage to back that up (probably more hard drives tbh), but for the moment the Japanese Verbatim 50GB BD-Rs offer a low cost of entry, reasonably affordable1 tertiary backup for my initial efforts (several external HDDs I already have will serve as a temporary secondary backup). I'm aware that they're not something I can just ignore for a decade before checking, but they do seem to be sufficiently robust to leave for several years rather than needed to check them once a year, and even then I can likely use a representative sample to keep track of potential issues.
The question I have is, what do people find is the most efficient drive for burning Blu Rays? Which drives handle dual (and triple, in case there's ever a sale of 100GB disks) best, with the fewest errors and failures to burn? Are there any programs you can recommend for checking and burning disks? Those of you with experience of making Blu Ray backups, do you have any advice or common mistakes I should avoid? Any advice is welcome.
1 ~$41 AUD/TB vs ~$25/TB for an 18TB recertified HDD, assuming only 80% of each is used). LTO7 currently runs to about $220 AUD/TB for the drive+free cartridge deal I've seen and obviously scales much better afterwards, while LTO5 is about as cost effective as the BD-R at the 80% use benchmark. Given the number of photo/video files I want to back up, my understanding is that it's unlikely to make use of the compression that would enable more favourable efficiency.