Bluray

[wilderness]

I'm considering adding a Bluray burner to my computer because of the larger data capacity (10-times more than DVD's).

I'm curious as to how many people have Bluray players on their computers?

Thanks in advance.

[cj]

I have a laptop with it for watching movies. When it comes to storage in those sizes, you can just as easily buy USB sticks. There can't be much difference in cost between those and buying the drive and the disks over time. That, and the Blu-rays are only portable if other machines can read them.

[wilderness]

Many thanks for your feedback.

A 64gb flash drive is in the 125+ range, however I don't think that I'd like to spend the required time awaiting data transfer (25-50GB) via a USB port.
The required transfer time might be acceptable for a one-time-only, however any repetition would out weight the benefits of the flash drive.

A Disc in a mailer ships easily, cheaply and quickly.

[Dave Schwartz]

For your own storage, go get one of the big multi-terabyte drives and a USB 3.0 port. Simple, easy. Lots of space.

[wilderness]

For your own storage, go get one of the big multi-terabyte drives and a USB 3.0 port. Simple, easy. Lots of space.

It's a bit more complicated than that Dave.
Many thanks.

I do have a large secondary drive for storage.

I'm an archivist, and have had a monthly backup procedure in place for more than ten years, however even the backup procedures (previously flawed) have required change as well. (When I first started my entire data fit on a single CD, these days and some months require a dual-layer DVD with the backup being incremental).
A restore from the incremental BU-discs would be quite tedious. (over the 10+ year period paths and directories have changed.)

Recently I provided my early archived data to two external destinations. That early data amounted to 40GB. My complete dataset is currently 150GB.

I suppose my needs are quite unique and should really be addressed with a commercial software.

I'm disappointed in the few replies that I've received of valid Bluray-users (not just in this forum), as I was hoping Bluray was more widely used.

[Dave Schwartz]

Wilderness,

I hate it when people tell me what I should do by addressing a question I didn't ask. Sorry. (I am a member of a programmer's newsgroup and there are a couple of guys who do that all the time. Instead of answering the question, they tell me that I should do something different.)

All that being said, let me tell you how I do MY backups. :lol:

I have 3 external hard drives, labelled A,B,C. My backups run automatically as well as on-demand. I use software that keeps the last 20 versions of each project/folder compressed.

At any given time 2 of the hard drives are off-property. Once each week the current drive goes to safety, and the oldest backup comes back.

I haven't lost anything in like 15 years.


Dave

[wilderness]

Many thanks for the feedback Dave.

I'm "addicted" to discs ;)

In the 10+ years I've lost one, and that was because the center hub cracked, as I was then using four-disc cases with a too-sturdy center-lock. I stopped using cases around six years ago, and when I made the transition from CD's to DVD's.

[Dave Schwartz]

The important part is to get them off-property. The nice thing about discs is that you can put them into a safe-deposit box, Can't do that with any kind of magnetic media.

[headhawg]

I'm disappointed in the few replies that I've received of valid Bluray-users (not just in this forum), as I was hoping Bluray was more widely used.If the data is that important why would you (or anyone else) backup to optical media? Short-term it would be fine but I wouldn't trust it over the long run. It's only 150GB. Before the floods in Thailand you could have picked up a couple of fast 1TB drives for a song. You could have done two backups, one to each drive if you were paranoid. I'm guessing that it will be March or April before prices return to normal.

You could look into tape drives; very reliable, but not fast.

[wilderness]

If the data is that important why would you (or anyone else) backup to optical media? Short-term it would be fine but I wouldn't trust it over the long run.

In the 10+ years I've lost one, and that was because the center hub cracked, as I was then using four-disc cases with a too-sturdy center-lock.

Many thanks.

Could you expand on "short term"?
I've some data CD's from 1999 that function just fine.