Blu-ray disks for archival

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coldpenguin

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Can anyone suggest a brand/place to get blu-ray roms from? I am intending on 'backing' up my photo raws to some BD disks and hiding them in the fire-safe.
 
Would you be storing them long term as writable optical discs aren't terribly good for long term storage? Recordable DVDs and CDs have been shown to lose data even after 5 or 10 years. It varies a lot with brand. Blu Rays have denser storage and potentially less durable. You can get archive grade optical media however which are rated for such purposes.

For backup purposes I would make multiple copies at least. I'd also store one copy off site. An optical disc in a safe might possibly still melt in a fire or be affected by heat, especially writeable discs.

Personally I archive onto multiple external hard discs and I'm also in the process of archiving to storage in "the cloud" via Amazon (using Jungledisc), though it's a slow process.

Oh and as with all backups, test or verify the backup after it's made. A backup is no use if it's not possible to restore it.
 
I am intending on using an internal RAID0 (stripe, not mirror), then backup to an internal drive, also copied to my server as RAW for all of my photos.
RAWs are going to be burnt to Blu-ray (supposedly they are not as susceptible to degredation as DVD, and I have too much to ideally put on DVD!). I am going to safe these.
Being really paranoid, I am considering getting two USB drives, and backing up once a week/month, and swapping to an offsite every-so-often.

I am surprised that 7day shop only deals with orders up to 10:30am. However, I have purchased 30, and am (still) waiting for them to arrive. Thanks for the link!
 
coldpenguin said:
I am intending on using an internal RAID0 (stripe, not mirror)
Click to expand...

RAID0 introduces a second failure point and does not provide redundancy. One disk dies, you lose the contents of both as there's no way to rebuild the array from a single disk.

The purpose of it eludes me, as does how it can possibly qualify to be called "RAID" at all.
 
onomatopoeia said:
RAID0 introduces a second failure point and does not provide redundancy. One disk dies, you lose the contents of both as there's no way to rebuild the array from a single disk.

The purpose of it eludes me, as does how it can possibly qualify to be called "RAID" at all.
Click to expand...

in theory RAID0 is supposed to increase IO, however if you have a fast disk in the first place the performance benefits are not worth the cost increase.

but yes, lose 1 RAID0 drive and thats ALL of the data gone.
 
Yes, RAID0 doesn't quite fit the acronym.

The idea in my system, was to increase the random IO reads/writes, (so long as they are predictive). I didn't quite explain what I am getting correctly.

OS is going onto disk 1 (very small disk), raid0 over disks 2 and 3, and disk 4 is twice the size of disks 2 and 3.
I will be running disk-to-disk backup between OS+RAID0 (i.e. disks 2 and 3) to disk 4 (and hoping that I never get 100% full).
So although I will have doubled the risk of 'data' loss, the recovery time should be relatively quick and painless (I might even get an onsite spare).
The real pain, will be OS disk loss, that would be more fun.
 
Even with true RAID, it's not a backup, it's just redundancy in case of drive failure. Corrupt a file on one drive and that corruption is mirrored to the others.

I have my photos on my main desktop which are then periodically backed up with a sync to my server and I also sync the last year's worth back and forth to my netbook. Then I have an off-site remote backup, on top of a backup to external USB drive.
 
Strictly RAID1 shouldn't do that. It should copy on write. A verify would generate a parity error, and any decent RAID system (there are less out there than you think) would allow you to choose which data is correct.
RAID6 allows for semi-automatic recovery of the type of corruption [I think] you are eluding to (i.e. I know it can recover drive corruption).
I don't think anyone on this thread mentioned that the RAID was a backup? The 'single' disk in the system is actually intended to be a 'backup' for the RAID.
RAWs are sync'd to my server on download (as it can display RAW on-the-fly), and I intend on copying to BDrom once I have a writer.
All-in-all, I would have 4 copies of RAW images, enough to perform checksum comparison to determine which one/where corruption occurred. Documents, I would have 2 copies of, but they generally can be checked or recreated easily.
Programs and Games, can be re-installed if necessary.
 
Yeah, what I meant was a corruption where you corrupt the file somehow, rather than the disc corrupts it. So the RAID assumes the file is fine and writes corrupt data to all the mirrors. Garbage-in Garbage-out. Easy to do in my case as I use NEFs and edit with Capture NX, and it makes the edits by appending actions to the original file. It's great as all the information is contained in one file, but if NX crashed in the middle of writing the file it could corrupt it. I protect myself by having backups and only update the backups when I'm done with the edits and confirmed all has been written successfully.

But yeah, if you're just using RAID as redundancy for access purposes it has benefits. Depends if high availability is important and you suffer from disc failures a lot (never had a genuine disc hardware failure in some 20 years myself). RAID0 I'm not a fan of myself for reasons mentioned above.

Anyway, loads of copies basically is best :D
 
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