Digital Archiving: 5 Reasons To Use Blu Ray / Optical Media

Optical media .... CDs, DVDs, Blu-Rays, and ... M-Discs (wait ... what's an M-Disc!?).
Many assume that this technology's heyday has come and gone.
For those passionate about preserving their personal data, however, optical media is still a good choice given that specific forms of it are among the sole forms of digital storage media engineered to withstand cold storage without suffering mechanical data degradation ("bit rot").
If you need more convincing, here are 5 reasons why archiving onto a modified version of the Blu Ray isn't as crazy as it might seem:
Intro - 00:00
Optical media in 2023 - 00:24
No cloud subscriptions / operating expenses - 01:06
No electricity required to store data - 01:55
It's easy to scale optical archives - 02:33
Retrieval is quick - 03:25
It's cheap to get started - 04:05

[@Jack_Warner]

I still have a few music CDs I burned in the late 1990s. I used to borrow CDs from the library and copy them. They still play fine. They were all Memorex CDs.

[@bilko991]

I recently found an old folder full of CDs that I had used to back up my data in the late 90s. I went through all the CDs and found they were all good, no bad reads or loss of data. I was pretty happy all things considered.

[@danielontech]

Fantastic!

[@modbox9560]

You would save more building an offsite collection on scratch resistant bd dual layer 10 discs give you easy 500GB also bd media doesnt matter type has built in error correction when it is being burned you can also double protect it by burning par2 files next to it if bitrot happens the par2 files can also be currupted and still recover even more than built in protection per 50GB or higher discs

[@bigrigwilltx5287]

Good video. You have made me think about my backup solutions for my plex server. I already have the drive and discs to start. I do wonder about the binder storage method how well is it working for you? How badly is it scratching your discs? I might not have seen the video but what are you using to catalog the discs? Keep up the good work. More and more people will soon realize that they still need physical media even if it now considered antiquated.

[@danielontech]

Thanks! The binder is kept stationary in shelving. Haven't noticed any damage to any discs and have read back the whole contents of discs without problem. As all I'm doing is archiving my KZbin vids I label the discs YT0823_on and YT_08231_off (for example). So MMYY then disc number (in the rare case there's more than one disc created per month). Finally the _on and _off suffixes are for on site and offsite copies respectively. I used to also maintain a Google Sheet cataloging the contents of each disc but got lazy. My use case is pretty niche - these are all videos hosted on KZbin that I will hopefully never have to access from my own records. So... it's an elaborate insurance policy against data loss of sorts!

[@donnanorth7324]

Is there a backup program that can backup to a series of BluRay discs? Can I back up a 1TB drive onto a series of discs, without breaking up the 1TB data manually into 50 gig pieces? That is what I am hoping some backup program can do for me. Thanks.

[@danielontech]

I'm afraid I have no idea but that's an excellent question. Perhaps somebody will have the answer!

[@tamrix]

Win rar can break up into chunks.

[@donnanorth7324]

@@tamrix This is for archival purposes. No zip wanted. OS agnostic data is on the discs. 7z can break up files too, but I asked about backup programs.

[@rodfer5406]

Yes, it its a pain…

[@modbox9560]

If your going to do this you need to have a sealed esd bagged brand new bluray combo with the medium eventually readers and writes will be like vhs players very hard to find also stockup and protect mutiple brand new burners from moisture ect same goes with the burned discs