blu ray as a permanent media storage??

D

dv416

Well-known member
im considering a solution besides buying lots of hard drives. anyone use blu ray BD-Rs as a means to archive tapeless media? if so, how is it? do you recommend?
 
i shoot around 4-6 times per month. usually no more than 32gb / shoot. this probably means hard drives would be the cheaper option...

but something about having a physical archive handy seems appealing. i dunno
 
In my opinion, I don't think you'll find a solution as practical, cost effective and efficient as using hard drives. You wont need lots of them for archiving, just two high quality, fairly large drives, capacity depending on how much data you need to routinely archive. I think you'll get pretty tired of transferring to BD, not to mention the slower access to bring it back up if you need it down the road.
 
dv416 said:
i shoot mayne 4-6 times per month. usually no more than 32gb / shoot. this probably means HD is the cheaper option...

but something about having a physical archive handy seems appealing. i dunno
Click to expand...

Hmmm.. 32GB per shoot. That's two 25GB disks. They are about $2.75 each. So $5.50 * 4 = $22 or $5.50 * 6 = $33.

If you want the cheaper option, then certainly HDD is the way to go. But there is absolutely no way, I'd rely on HDD as a long term storage solution. BluRay may not really be the answer either.
 
if you would not rely on a hdd, you can certainly rely on two hdds, alot of people complain about hard drive failure, but in all reality, if you buy a new hard drive and use it for a couple of years as an archiving solution, it would be really rare for a failure to happen, if you replace the drives with newer ones every few years, hdds have a nice life expectancy.

archiving to two seperate drives would be a nice solution.
 
dv416 said:
well, what do veteran tapeless folk do, then? hard drive?
Click to expand...
Hard-drive as temporary back-up, and LTO tape as long-term storage.

But unless you are routinely backing up tons and tons of data, LTO is probably not going to be a cost-effective solution.

Your best bet is 2 or 3 copies of the footage on separate hard-drives.
 
Last edited:
I use multiple redundant hard drives.

Not perfect. Tape is probably the best solution, but still pricey and not random access.
 
I use hard drives as well. There can be problems, of course, but people seem to have built up this idea that they're fragile little flowers. They're not.
 
I'd vote for Blu-Ray and HDs. Blu-ray for a safe, always offline backup just in case, HD for easy access. Any time a HD is in operation, it's at risk from a number of factors, from human error to drive failure to OS bugs to power outages. If both your HD backups are online at the same time (say, "backing up" data from one to the other), they can both be lost. A pure HD-based backup should have at least three drives, kept in rotation such that no more than two are online at the same time - and keep the P2s write-protected until you're sure the data's on all three drives!

For the quantities of data you mention, Blu-Ray sounds lie a reasonable fit, and reasonable cost.

Of course, there's no good data yet about Blu-Ray lifespan....
 
I'm using BD-R for long term archive. I will need the burner eventually, and the price of disk media will only keep coming down. Toast does a very nice job of creating a multiple disk archive.
 
PerroneFord said:
Hmmm.. 32GB per shoot. That's two 25GB disks. They are about $2.75 each. So $5.50 * 4 = $22 or $5.50 * 6 = $33.
Click to expand...
Compared to 8GB DVDs, which are about $1 apiece, this is a comparable deal, but a more convenient one if a whole card can fit one disc. 24GB cards should be ideal.

I would not split a card by discs, unless a burning software can do it intelligently, by correctly modifying AVCHD directory tree for the first and the second disc. Without proper directory tree FCP won't import in, and a BD player won't play it.

I still use 4GB and 8GB cards, so I don't care much about card splitting and BD burning ;-) 4GB DVDs can be easily found for 20c apiece, or some better Taiyo Yudens for about 33c apiece.
 
16Gb cards fit neatly onto a 25GB BluRay. A 24GB card (never seen one of those) would be too large. A formatted BluRay disk only holds about 23.5 GB. I prefer the option of putting 1hr of video onto 1 piece of media. This is what I get with a 25Gb BluRay disk and XDCAm or 5D/7D files.
 
well, what do veteran tapeless folk do, then? hard drive?
Click to expand...
ive been using drives for over 3 years (more like 10 actually. ive always used drives for archiving) without a single hiccup. ive had a couple power supplies or enclosures go bad but thats always an easy fix

one word of wisdom - DO NOT BUY ANY BRAND YOU CAN FIND AT OFFICE DEPOT/STAPLES!
use industry proven products from reputable vendors. caldigit, glyph, promax, owc, etc...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top