Re: Backup to Blu-ray M-Disc

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

Sad Clouds <cryintothebluesky%gmail.com@localhost> writes:

> On Fri, 27 Dec 2019 10:29:40 -0500 (EST)
> Ethan O'Toole <telmnstr%757.org@localhost> wrote:
>
>> > OK Blu-ray M-Discs are expensive, but LTO-5 tape drive is around
>> > $2K, that is equivalent to about 165 100GB M-Discs.
>> 
>> Oh, got my two LTO-5 drives from a trash bin.
>
> As long as they work. These days they don't make hardware as good as
> they used to. My Samsung Blu-ray movie player died on Christmas day,
> only had it for around 4 years. I opened the drive trying to fix it,
> but it was full of flimsy plastic gears and pulleys, which fell out the
> minute I took the cover off. I have other equipment like HP deskjet
> printer which I had for 18 years and it still works without any issues.

I used to be a huge fan of writing tapes and taking them offsite, and 15
years ago would have suggested LTO-2 (and LTO-3?) drives.

But now, disk drives are pretty inexpensive, and would recommend for
most people having some largish number of external drives, two each for
multiple offsite locations, and rotating backups among them with
something like bup that retains the older ones, deduplicated.  Yes, over
time they get too small and you have to get new ones -- usually before
they fail -- but the total cost of new disks is probably under
$200/year, and there is no magic involved.

With the fancy formats (including bluray) you really need to stash
readers for your format elsewhere.  usb2/3 disks, on the other hand, can
be read just about anywhere, even if you have to install NetBSD to deal
with UFS (and if you are paranoid, cgd or similar).