Archiving Solid State Media

greeches

greeches

Veteran
What does everyone else here do?

I've been contemplating getting a BluRay burner to begin to backup some older projects for archive.

Currently I have a ton of individual hard drives (not raided) that I physically swap out and store for archival purposes, but would really like to move to a non-mechanical media.

Anyone, anyone?
 
I burn to BluRay 25 or 50. Slow, but works well. If you've got volume of work to do, then something like LTO might be better suited.
 
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Those sizes would work well for me as my biggest SDHC is 32GB. So you archive it to bluray then delete the original files? I always have trouble deleting files...
 
I archive to bluray and it seems to work great. I also have a hard time deleting files though. It takes me around an hour to burn a 22.5 gb disc.
 
For my projects, I burn:

1. Original BPAV file (Sony native format on the XDCam cameras)
2. Master of the project in Jpeg2000
3. Project file
4. Reader for the master file
5. External elements necessary to recreate the project.

This way, each disk is self-contained and contains all info necessary to recreate the project and view the project.
 
^That's along the lines of my archiving practices.

What do you pay for BD media? Any coasters?

Thanks for all the input!
 
Where do you buy BDs?

I've burned a lot of Blu-rays but I haven't been using them for data storage. I have an 8TB RAID but that will obviously fill up.
 
greeches said:
^That's along the lines of my archiving practices.

What do you pay for BD media? Any coasters?

Thanks for all the input!
Click to expand...

I pay about $2.50 for 25GB BluRays. My last purchase was around Christmas. I got 30 25GB and I think 20 50GB which are a lot more expensive. I think I paid $17.99 for those, but I use them so rarely, it's ok.

Nope, no coasters since I started doing this in 2008.
 
You can find used LTO2 drives on ebay for $100 - $300, I found one for $70! The Ultrium 2 tapes hold 200GB (400GB compressed) and run $18 to $25 each. Rock solid backup. Similar price per GB as BD-R but I think it's way easier and much more robust. The tapes are backwards compatible to read so when I upgrade the drive to LTOx I'm OK. I backup live RAID work drives to a RAID NAS then NAS to LTO. Some projects get a tape(s) to themselves, otherwise it's incremental to a series of tapes over a month. I use Retrospect to create catalogs that can be browsed instantly and to set up backup routines to run overnight and weekly. It runs on my server and collects from all my workstations (Win, Mac and Linux)

I've done the stack of hard drives, HDD docks and FW enclosures and I always cringed when spinning up a drive that had been on the shelf for a few months... BD-R media makes me nervous about storage and retrival do to possible scratches, bad burns and flaky read drives. I have old CD/DVD-R media I can't read anymore and they're not that old... Not to mention most of my projects generate more than 25GB so I was constantly spanning media. I'd have been felt more secure with Professional Disc but LTO makes more economic sence (and I'm not currently shooting XDCAM media).

LTO is the way to go and if you can afford newer drives (LTO 3, 4, 5 etc.) all the better (faster and *huge* capacity).
 
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