Durability of BDs

[x9200]

I am in a progress of copying my entire disc collection to hdds and such and I noticed one very interesting thing: more recently released blu ray disks appears of much lower durability to what was released few years ago. I have discs virtually spotless or even never used that show errors.
Anybody with similar observation?

[bgd]

Not with blu ray but years back with the writeable DVDs. I was using them for storage and learnt the hard way that, unless archival quality, they don't last.

[x9200]

Generally not a good idea to record anything on erasable media. Having said that, no reasonable choice for backing up high capacity formats like the said BDs.

For the DVDs though, for the pieces I value, and for any other files I intend to keep I use M-Discs.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/torture-te ... -year-dvd/

[Strong Eagle]

Generally not a good idea to record anything on erasable media. Having said that, no reasonable choice for backing up high capacity formats like the said BDs.

Cloud backup provides the best long term storage options.

[x9200]

Cloud backups are fine if the storage demands are below 1TB and one is a typical Windows or a Mac user.
BTW, what do the cloud storage providers guaranty regarding the stored data redundancy (backups of the cloud drive content)?

[Strong Eagle]

Cloud backups are fine if the storage demands are below 1TB and one is a typical Windows or a Mac user.
BTW, what do the cloud storage providers guaranty regarding the stored data redundancy (backups of the cloud drive content)?

Quite a few services offer unlimited storage so long as it is limited to one PC. For example, I use

https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html, and because my wife backs up her PC to my USB drive (she has far less junk on her PC) we get them both backed up.

Besides BackBlaze I recall that Crashplan, Acronis, and Carbonite also have unlimited storage and 1 PC.

As for data redundancy, you may find this page interesting: https://www.backblaze.com/hard-drive.html

The reality is that every cloud provider uses RAID of some sort and usually also maintains duplicates of RAID data. Even I do this... two on premise servers with RAID 10's and a mostly asleep cloud appliance that applies update in sync with the servers. A lot of have geographically separate duplicates so that if there is a failure in one datacenter, you've still got access through another. DFS and its Linux equivalent is a lovely thing.

One can never say never, and out of all the backup options available, and unless you just signed up with Uncle Herky's Economy Backup Service, consisting of a 486 and one hard drive, cloud is more reliable and robust that anything you can connect locally.

One other thing... ransomware will gladly encrypt your USB attached shared drives so that's not really a safe backup option. Your cloud backup won't be affected.

[x9200]

Cloud backups are fine if the storage demands are below 1TB and one is a typical Windows or a Mac user.
BTW, what do the cloud storage providers guaranty regarding the stored data redundancy (backups of the cloud drive content)?

Quite a few services offer unlimited storage so long as it is limited to one PC. For example, I use

https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html, and because my wife backs up her PC to my USB drive (she has far less junk on her PC) we get them both backed up.

Besides BackBlaze I recall that Crashplan, Acronis, and Carbonite also have unlimited storage and 1 PC.

I am impressed how quickly the cloud storage expansion progresses and the companies mentioned provide some excellent solutions for a workstation based backups for an average user, but...that's it. I don't think their intention is to let me dump 20TB of multimedia files even if I could do it via a single PC.

I also have some hesitation to consider it a long-term safe storage. It is this sort of storage that requires frequent maintenance (the money in this case). It also depends on the operator and the operators come and go. Basically the intention of having this type of backups is to provide safety to the operation window (home or business), so a few years at best of the storage.

Now, if I compare it to the M-Dics, I can fall into a coma for a few years and the information will still be there. Same actually goes with the old fashion hard drive that are generally agreed to last for years if properly stored and the data is refreshed once every few years.

Of course, similarly to the cloud storage what is required is redundancy and specifically geo-redundancy, so in an unlikely event of a theft or fire or anything catastrophic, at least one copy remains.

For an average user I would simply use the cloud base storage for daily incremental backups but once some projects, documents or other files are consider to be long-term critical, I would archive them using some cloud independent storage.

For not so an average user, a major drawback of the cloud storage is that it depends on propriety clients. I would consider such a dependence unsafe because you have to trust a third party in accessing all data on your PC. I normally not allow to run on my machines anything with admin (root) privileges that is not community screened via openly available source codes.

BTW, I am very impressed by BackBlaze, the systematic data they provide for various hdds failures. Truly impressive and very useful work.

[Strong Eagle]

Yes - ever since I've read that chart, I've only purchased HGST. although I do have WD Reds in one server... we shall see.

[x9200]

I stopped using Seagate hdds ca 15y ago - 100% failures in a short time. My choice was WDC hard drives and having them more than 50pcs in use or used the record is almost spotless. Specifically I used the Green WDCs and I had them in 2 cctv recorders (6y and 3y 24/7 use) and in a general server (5y). But definitely I will give now a better consideration the Hitachi hdds.

What is scary how much the reliability varies for the other manufactures model to model.

BTW, have you noticed the impact the rotation speed have on the hdds reliability for the Hitachi drives? Not that this is anything unexpected, but nice to see it that clearly. Unless one really needs the 7k2 speeds (very rare in home use IMHO), its better to chose the slower kinds.

[Strong Eagle]

I hadn't looked at the rotational speed aspect of it before.

I had always been under the assumption that drives with lower data packing densities... 2 TB versus 8 TB, for example, would have better failure rates because of the increased density... but that doesn't seem to be the case at all across all the brands.

[x9200]

For the models listed, I think the storage density may be pretty similar. For example, what I quickly googled out the st4000dm000 (4TB) model has 4 physical disks while the 8TB has them 8.
The density should affect how much of data is lost when something goes wrong but not necessarily things like AFR - I believe the main failure modes are related to the collision of the reading/writing heads with the disk, or objects on the disc (i.e. particles) or ageing (wearing off) of the mechanical parts.

[x9200]

So getting back to my original post, if you have blu rays that are valuable to you, make copies as soon as you buy them. There are plenty of software that can do this.