Are Blu-Ray recordable disks reliable and cost-effective for backups and data storage?
I'm considering moving from DVD-Rs to Blu-Ray Recordable disks to backup my data. I don't have any experience with BD-Rs as of yet, though, and I wonder if it's worth it or I should wait another year or two.
I clearly remember that when DVDs were still the new thing you could reasonably expect a 20% coaster rate, and after one, maybe two years a lot of successfully recorded disks became totally or partially unreadable. Same thing happened years before with CD-Rs.
Considering that as of January 2012 the price of a single BD-R hovers around $2.40, and considering that I need at least 200 of them to move my data, I'm now treading lightly.
I'd appreciate to hear from someone who made the switch and can speak from experience.
As an aside, the cost per gigabyte of BD-Rs seems to be only slightly higher than DVD-Rs': $0.096 for BD-Rs (25 / $2.40) and ~$0.070 for DVD-Rs (4.3 / $0.3). The higher density of BD-Rs, in my opinion, compensates for the slightly higher price. Still, reliability comes first.
Solution 1:
I seriously would recommend you get HDDs as a backup:
Reasons:
- They are cheaper
- You can keep your data always up to date
- You can plug them in anywere
- Faster Backup
If you check HDD prices today, they are probably quite high, this is still due to the flooding in Thailand, which made the prices for HDDs explode - doubled prices!
Solution 2:
There is no perfect way to keep data, all media will degrade over time. The best way is multiple backups, probably on different media, kept on different sites to guard against fire, flood, etc.
Solution 3:
200 BD-R discs * 2.40 = 480$
4 * Seagate Barracuda Green ST2000DL003 2TB 5900 RPM * 150.00 = 600$
If you set up a ZFS RAID-Z array, you would have 6TB of available space and one drive could fail completely, before you would be in trouble.
Solution 4:
I was also wondering if BD writers are reliable now. I agree with Xavierjazz - back up to different types of media, and keep them in different locations. I suppose using the "cloud" would be convenient - it is in a different location, but you don't need to leave your home to access it. I definitely wouldn't use the cloud as my only means of backing up though.
Now back to the BD question. I know that in the CD/DVD world, Verbatim and Taiyo Yuden are the top brands of media, so perhaps that is still true when it comes to BD media. Also, after you have burned a CD or DVD, you can use a free program called Nero CD-DVD Speed to test the media and it will give you an idea of what the burn quality is. For example, it reads the media and tells you how many errors the drive encountered (yes, even with perfectly readable media, all drives will encounter thousands of errors - that is normal and part of the specification for optical media). For BD media, there's a new version of the program called Opti Drive Control, which is payware and which I haven't used.