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TBH I would consider one of these. I've been thinking about using discs for long-term backups, and I've also been planning to start buying music and stuff more instead of effectively renting from streaming services.
Most writable disks have a poor life. the only good long term backup option is lots of redundancy and regular check that they are all readable - recreating what isn't before you lose it
Yeah, gotta use ISO/IEC 18630 certified discs and burner to ensure longevity.
That's a good start, but the most effective backup is manually carving the binary contents of a file onto steel plates that are many miles long.
Steel decays pretty quickly. The most durably data storage medium we've figured out is still ceramics
Metal can not be changed by Ruin
Maybe wrong community for this
Well there we go.
Honestly I just go for redundant drives and 3-2-1 backups, I remember looking at those pioneer bluray discs when they were announced and quickly deciding it wasn't worth the cost.
Your steel plate backup system sounds intriguing though - maybe it can be used as wallpaper? "What's that on your walls?" "My wedding photos"
The great part of that idea is that no one will think you're crazy when they see painstakingly carved rows of binary covering every surface of your home.
Will they know it's binary? Surely the dots would be so small it looks like noise unless there's an emerging pattern from file headers etc
CDs are rated for 10–30 years,, Blurays for 50–80. YMMV with cheap low quality disks, of course.
As someone else mentioned, CDs, DVDs, and especially BDs are supposed to last quite a while. I'd obviously burn more than one though and check them occasionally (and probably throw most of it on encrypted cloud storage in case there's a fire or something).
I recently found some cheap CDs and DVDs that I backed my stuff up on 17 years ago and the data was pristine 👌
Wouldn't it better to buy a BD/DVD drive for desktop? This way you can rip movies/music and access them on any device.
I mean, I'd still have the physical collection then, which would just be sitting there picking up dust. Even with it ripped, I'd probably still want to use the disc sometimes. I also tend to displace things like CD drives if I don't use them for a while lol (I have a CD/DVD drive somewhere, but I have no idea where I put it), which makes the backup idea sort of problematic.
I've looked pretty extensively into this. My plan is to get a disk toaster and pick up some refurb drives, around 8tb or so. The cost of a good bluray burner is about $160, and each 100yr disc is $11 for 50gb. Meanwhile the toaster is $30, and HDDs are about $150 new for 8tb, less with refurbs. I just know that one coaster run of a bluray burn would send me off to a tirade. Less space, less cost, less risk of damage, and more likely to be useable in the future. Bonus for read speeds and rewrite ability.
I think if you've got a ton of data, that does make more sense. I personally don't think I have much that I think is super important though (at the least atm, it'd mostly be photos). The drives will likely die earlier though.
My photos rest on my 8tb WD Pro NAS drive, and OMV does a backup on another smaller 2TB drive. I also have an external 2TB for occasional extra backups. I plan on converting all my dvdr and cdrs into hdd data. Sadly, a bunch of my cdrs are kaput, rotted and falling apart. I never realized how important it was to buy burnable media that uses chemicals instead of organic dyes. I guess I just assumed 15yrs ago it was all chemical.
Never had a BD drive in a laptop, went straight from a DVD/CD drive to no optical drives. Does Windows even support BD copyright protection these days?
Literally the only legitimate way to watch encrypted Blu-rays on Windows is with CyberShot PowerDVD.
Not even VLC?
Nope. It will fail to read. You have to use community software along with definitely illegitimate key files to decode most any commercial release. On top of this, some predatory releases will scramble the chapters unless you know which playlist to select out of hundreds, which is information passed to PowerDVD and literally no one else (within the PC software space).
MakeMKV works too.
Key word legitimate. Without the community key files it doesn’t do anything on its own.
I've never had a BD anything. Unless the PS4 did them, but I'd never had needed to know.
yes PS4 was bluray.
I put one in my laptop over a decade ago just because I could. I didn’t ever get any actual use out of it. It was an utter waste of money but party because I didn’t know what software I needed to use it, which was due to me not knowing I needed proprietary software to properly use it to watch movies.
Where can I get one for my ThinkPad L440? It has an optical bay only occupied by a dummy.
Look at your favourite online retailer. All SATA laptop drives are intercompatible.