Seriously now.
dr100
joined 2 years ago
This is why you ALWAYS need INDEPENDENT backups. You can think all day long about detecting bitrot, and how well you're protected against X drive failures but then something comes from the side and messes up your data in a different way than you've foreseen.
All Blu-Ray burners are M-Disc Blu-Ray burners. What's more, there was even before some contention regarding how/if they're actually different but now as Verbatim isn't the "japanese Verbatim" they don't even bother to put the different metadata (MILLEN...) for the M-Discs, so they are probably 100% the same except for the box/spindle label.
Probably full read (like a badblocks in Linux or HD Tune Pro in Windows) should check everything on the physical level (note that all storage nowadays has checksums and even recovery data itself, this is why mostly everyone can ignore all the checksumming file systems without mostly everything falling apart).
Back up as soon as possible everything you care about from there, starting with the small stuff. Then next time when you have "some important data" have multiple copies of it and check them periodically.
Wasn't the 18TBs on sale at the same price?
Well, if it works for you and you're aware about the risks (both to have the data exposed and inaccessible/lost at some point) why not. Tell us more, how much you're using and how often you put stuff there, how you manage it?
There's even a great sale right now on physical media, 18TB Easystores for $199!
Keybase has 250GB for free, not accessible via rclone, but decently mountable from anything including VPSes.
Large drives are perfectly similar, and people like them mostly on subjective criteria like brand loyalty. Of course, based on your region there might be significant differences in prices and warranty, which you might want to consider.
I'd STRONGLY suggest not to mess with TB sized archives or archive parts. Put the smaller drives together with mergerfs (use a rclone union remote if on one OS that doesn't do mergerfs) and then copy there everything you want. If you think not all will make it enable file system compression if you think the files will compress, if not exclude some directories you might not really need to back up.
The point is you'll still have the originals, which you might in the meantime have removed (for example if one would reorganize a huge collection and started by working on the reflinked copy and in the end removed the original, natural cleanup workflow, not many would think that you'd need to check the results after a reflinked nearly-instant copy, not even foresee that if there's some bitrot it'll come from THAT).
Sure, in this case snapshots would have worked just as well, but of course there are other cases in which they wouldn't have. Independent backups cover everything, well assuming you have enough history which is another discussion (I was considering to literally keep it forever after removing some old important file by mistake, but it becomes too daunting and too tempting to remove files removed 1,2,3 years ago).