Question With BD-Rs discontinued, what is everyone using for historical backups?

[davidortenn79]

So, I came across this post...

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-i...ess-production-to-continue-until-unprofitable

So, if Sony is killing off BDR discs because it's not profitable, probably wont be long until BD-R drives aren't sold anymore since you can't get media for it. I have a closet full of backups I made using the M discs that last like 1,000 years. The discs will last that long, but will there be a drive that can read it in 20 years? Will my drive still work? Most likely I'll have thrown away my PC in the next 5 years. If I needed to read one, will there be a way to buy a BD-R drive and hook it to a computer? So annoying. I have my data in the cloud and on a NAS... but I like the optical media write once read many so, if later I check and the media I have backed up on my NAS is corrupt, I know I have a good copy on the BD-R. It hasn't changed from when it was backed up.

I have every picture of our family and home video backed up and I'm constantly terrified about losing them. The more I get the harder it is to figure out something is missing before I lose my chance to get it back. I recently digitized all of our old photos back to 1910. Took me months of feeding them through a high speed photo quality scanner. Granted, I didn't shred the originals, so I still have that all in boxes. But the digital only videos and pictures I worry about.

 

[USAFRet]

Multiple copies, refreshed and moved to new devices every once in a while.

Currently in my NAS, I have files of mine from the early 90's and before.

 

[JeffreyP55]

Still use optical disks. 4k Blu-ray is simply the best. Stuff also moved to hard drives.

 

[davidortenn79]

Multiple copies, refreshed and moved to new devices every once in a while.

Currently in my NAS, I have files of mine from the early 90's and before.

I think when you move to new devices and make new copies is when things ultimately get corrupt over the years. And you don't notice it at the time. Maybe there's a bad data block logically. But when you then copy it to the new media, you now burned in or made that logical bad sector permanent in the new copy. Or maybe that bad block causes the copy to skip the file when copying it to new media. But not moving to new media, old media degrades and goes bad...

 

[Misgar]

will there be a drive that can read it in 20 years

Brand new drives might may not be available in 2044, but you could hang on to a bunch of Blu-ray drives and keep your fingers crossed. I recently bought another Blu-ray writer, to burn 4K GoPro videos to BDR. I have Blu-ray writers in three older machines, but doubt they'll all be working in 20 years. I also have 5.25" floppy drives and discs from 1985. Haven't touched them in decades.

I recently digitized all of our old photos back to 1910

My mother PhotoShopped old family photos from the 1880's to get rid of creases and recreate missing sections, then saved them in a Lightroom database. I still have trays full of Kodacrome 25, 64 & 200 and Velvia, also scanned in on a Coolscan 5000ED and SF-210 slide feeder.

But the digital only videos and pictures I worry about.

Amongst many other backups, I save photos to LTO (Linear Tape Open) and slide the red tab on the tape over to Read-only. Estimated life of LTO is up to 30 years, but compatible drives might no longer exist.

I have a closet full of backups I made using the M discs that last like 1,000 years

Fair enough, but will there still be any way of reading M-discs back in 3024? The trick is to copy your archives to new (current technology) media every 5 to 10 years.

Maybe there's a bad data block logically. But when you then copy it to the new media, you now burned in or made that logical bad sector permanent in the new copy.

Use ZFS with built in error detection and data scrubbing? Might not work with removeable media?
https://www.open-e.com/blog/data-integrity-raidz/

 

[USAFRet]

I think when you move to new devices and make new copies is when things ultimately get corrupt over the years. And you don't notice it at the time. Maybe there's a bad data block logically. But when you then copy it to the new media, you now burned in or made that logical bad sector permanent in the new copy. But not moving to new media, old media degrades and goes bad...

As opposed to writing once, and leaving it on the shelf for years? Hoping that it will work.
I've had movies burned to DVD fail after only 5 years.
Maybe it was a bad batch of DVD. But you never know until you try it.

As to corruption, this is where multiple copies comes in. Unlikely they all go bad at once.

 

[davidortenn79]

As of now, I'm using a synology DS923+ nas that I currently have three 12 TB HDs in them setup in a RAID 5. I have extra 12 TB hard drives sitting in a cupboard that, if one of the 3 starts to fail, I always have a new drive that has never been used ready to swap it out. I also back up the RAID 5 to a local USB drive as well as cloud storage. On top of that, I have all the same photos and videos in Google Photos.

Yesterday I wrote a python script that uses the google photos api that goes in and gives me random photos and videos from my google photos so I can then check my synology photos to make sure they're there. But, I don't have any auto syncs so, if a delete happens on one, it won't auto delete the other. All syncs between google and synology are completely manual.

If anyone is into python coding, I could get you the code. So far it seems to work pretty good. It picks a random time and then gives you 10 photos from that time. I used a random python library that seems to be pulling pretty random so far from my test in the last day or so. (Random can be difficult to code since computers aren't random.)

The BDRs I have in my closet though are of all of the photos from when my kids were first born. They're all on synology and google photos too. But, those photos on those discs are just more special to me than the newer stuff.

 

[davidortenn79]

I guess I was assuming bd-rs wouldn't be around 20-30 years from now. But, right now seems too soon. Sooner than I was thinking a few years ago when I paid all of this money for these discs and drives.

 

[USAFRet]

As of now, I'm using a synology DS923+ nas that I currently have three 12 TB HDs in them setup in a RAID 5. I have extra 12 TB hard drives sitting in a cupboard that, if one of the 3 starts to fail, I always have a new drive that has never been used ready to swap it out.

Have you looked into the rebuild time for that RAID 5?

Swapping in a new replacement, that would easily take about 18-24 hours to rebuild the array.

 

[davidortenn79]

I ended up having to go back to some my old media a few months ago. Some was missing. Also, years ago, when I thought I knew what I was doing but maybe didn't, I converted some of the videos and some didnt have sound and some the resolution was messed up. My camera from then the files it created isn't compatible with synology's media players. Although a few months ago, I used chatgpt to go back to the original media and it created me some scripts that converted it to what it said was the most compatible media for now and with minimal data loss and no distortion of resolution. So, hopefully I'm good for now with the super old media.

 

[davidortenn79]

Have you looked into the rebuild time for that RAID 5?

Swapping in a new replacement, that would easily take about 18-24 hours to rebuild the array.

I have had to replace drives. Yeah, I can't remember exactly how long it took. I did have one drive fail maybe a half a year ago. Took days or longer... maybe a week to fully get back to a healthy state.

 

[davidortenn79]

Space wise on the NAS, I should be good for a very long time. I had the NAS pretty full but somehow over the years, my pictures and videos got duplicated and a lot of stuff did. But I spent months carefully deduplicating everything. Confirming every single file. Now down to less than 1 TB. I have like 20+ TB of usable space on my NAS. My NAS also serves as my home OTA DVR/Plex, BIND DNS, MS Office replacement, Google Drive replacement using Synology Office. I installed git on the NAS and have entertained maybe initializing git on my photos folder to watch for changes. Maybe need to look into that further.

 

[davidortenn79]

take that back, i have 19.1 TB free space.... lol

 

[davidortenn79]

I saw this post a few weeks ago. We're losing 90s music due to dying discs...

The Music Industry’s ’90s Hard Drives Are Dying

The hard disk drives that the music industry relied on to archive a generation of albums are increasingly unreadable.

www.wired.com

 

[davidortenn79]

For old photos, I highly recommend the Epson FF-680W scanner. Also have an epson flatbed photo scanner that works well for larger and more fragile older photos.

 

[USAFRet]

I saw this post a few weeks ago. We're losing 90s music due to dying discs...

The Music Industry’s ’90s Hard Drives Are Dying

The hard disk drives that the music industry relied on to archive a generation of albums are increasingly unreadable.

www.wired.com

Yep.

Write once, put it on the shelf...poof.

 

[Misgar]

Have you looked into the rebuild time for that RAID 5?

Agreed. I'm happier with RAID-6 / RAID-Z2 for more resiliency. There's always a slight risk one of the remaining drives in a RAID-5 array will go bad during resilvering. However, the OP has plenty of backups so it shouldn't be a problem.

I saw this post a few weeks ago. We're losing 90s music due to dying discs...

Should have saved them to 33 rpm vinyl, old 78 shellac, or wax cylinders. Only kidding.

 

[Mostly.Peaceful]

Right now I use THIS. It goes on sale frequently. It's full of (6) 20TB and (4) 24TB drives and I have backups and then backups of backups. Works great. USB C connection.