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I have to do some backup. I was thinking about NAS/online solution but for online I have to pay a lot and for NAS... I won't run it 0-24. Can't really afford this kind of luxury.

So I want to backup to Blu-ray discs. If possible, I'd like to use an external USB drive but I don't know if those are safe and reliable enough. Also, if the transfer speed is enough (USB).

From the Title: Does anyone use it "in production"? Can I trust blu-ray?
Could you point me to a usable external drive?

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4 Answers

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For the price of an external Bluray writer, I'd rather buy 2 or 3 2.5" external hard disks of 500GB each and rotate them. Of course, it also depends on how much data you back up, how often it changes, etc.

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+1. If you watch slickdeals or a similar site, you can see 2 TB externals go for as low ~$100 (if you're patient). 1 TB drives (especially internal drives) can easily be sub-$100. At that price point I don't ever see myself adopting a blu-ray drive. – Michael Jul 13 '10 at 15:09
I'll accept your answer. Basically you made the same point as others but seems like the community like yours more. :) | (See my new question..) – Shiki Jul 13 '10 at 18:16
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This is really interesting question. If I understand it correctly, then I'm afraid that the correct answer is that there is no answer. Blu-ray disks aren't in production for long enough to generate enough information about their durability. Also, from time to time disk manufacturing processes change.

What you really need is a comparison of durabilities of disks from various manufacturers. Blu-ray disks are more susceptible to scratch damage than DVDs. I can't give you more information than Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc

Also, as far as I know, only common disk type which has integrity check is DVD-RAM, but it can hold much smaller amount of data than BD-Rs.

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To answer your question: No, you can't trust blu-ray discs. Even if they don't get damaged or corrupted (which they might) you can't trust them.

The affordable blu-ray discs store 25 gigs so in order to back up a typical hard drive you need about 10 of them. When your data has changed, you need to have some kind of system in place where you can back up only the changed data to a new disc. To save money, you will want to do this about once for every 20 gigs or so of new data.

  • it's expensive.
  • it takes a long time.
  • it's not automatic
  • Because of the above, you will likely not do it as often as you should.

This is an unreliable backup method, so again, you can't trust blu-ray.

To solve your problem, as others have mentioned - you don't need a NAS. Get 2 (or more, but not less) external drives and plug them in as needed. One external drive is equivalent to 20-80 re-writable blu-ray disks, and you can set up an automatic backup that can run in your sleep or while you are at work.

Back up daily and switch them weekly, or monthly. Keep one of the drives at a friend's house and you have enterprise quality storage.

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I do not write any backups to rotating media any more (ok, except hd-storage). I do not trust them enough to be readable in <insert_arbitrary_timespan_here>.

Either encrypted cloud-storage or a normal hd-storage where I can check integrity of the data every time I want to.

With "normal hd-storage" I mean: either NAS or just a bunch of the cheapest usb-disks you can find. even 32gb usb-sticks are an option I would prefer over rotating, laser-read discs.

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HDD storage is good. But for NAS I'd need a lot of disks. And a case and a and a aaa. Guess you know what I mean. Also, electricity, cables again, bla bla. Cloud storage is good, but I'd like to keep in sync, not just pushing it up now and then. Like Dropbox. But Dropbox is not something that everyone can afford. Sadly I'm not frmo the US, nor I am a rich person.. so I have to come up the cheapest and best solution in the end. – Shiki Jul 13 '10 at 12:51
(Dropbox would be good as I said, but the prices are too much. Checked all the alternative ones but whether they cost a lot or they won't provide the same flexibility.) – Shiki Jul 13 '10 at 12:59
Also: At some area the upload speed is very slow. I've got only about ~100K at very best. I did a small calculation, I'd need ~20 days of constant upload just to backup one PC. :) – Shiki Jul 13 '10 at 13:13
some cloud-storage services provide incremental backups + a bring-in service: you write your backup to xyz and ship it via snail-mail to the service. – akira Jul 13 '10 at 14:37
and i do not understand your NAS-lots-of-disks argument. – akira Jul 13 '10 at 14:38

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