Jim wrote:
Hi everyone, so i have been backing up data/movies to DVD for years and
it's served me well, i know many will say optical drives and media are
dead but i'm in the camp that does not agree. I still back up to HDD
(both internal & external) and vital images and docs get uploaded every
24 hours (about 1GB) but i know full well one day a HDD will work fine
and plug it back in a week later and clcik of death so backing up to
optical media and just another safety net, so now i have that lot off my
chest on to the reason for the post.

What kind of burner to go for, but please bear in mind that reliablity
of the media is high up on my list, i think i have heard of something
called "M" but hear the media is rare as rocking horse sh1t and it ain't
cheap but i'm confused by drive type and media types, for example i see
some media goes from 25GB to 200GB, the drives themselves Blu-ray BD-RE,
Blu-ray BD-RE Dual Layer, Blu-ray BD-R Dual Layer, Blu-ray BD-R and the
usual RW formats which i doubt i would use much but i guess could come
in handy sometimes, i also see 4k versions coming online now.

I have done some googleing and found a few articles but none mention the
media side of things and was hoping some of you folks could help me out
a bit.

TIA

Jim

Without getting techie, a review of media availability (compared
to last year), suggests this industry is dying.

Last year I could see more entries for BD-XL, and the prices
seemed better last year.

Do you want to hitch your wagon to a dead technology ?

I can see one popular optical drive model number on Newegg, is unreliable,
with the last couple of reviews being of the "died after three months"
type. That sort of thing would be important, if you expected
a drive you put in a cardboard box, to have a reasonable chance
of working 20 years from now.

Even hard drives soon, by design, won't have "longevity". The
industry seems to be headed towards an "all-Helium" future.
My favorite air-breather is discontinued, and I seem to be
seeing a stack of Helium drives with linear pricing. The
Helium is guaranteed to stay inside the drive for (5) years.
If I wanted to dig a hole in the back yard, drop a Helium drive
in the hole, what would I find 20 years from now ? Whereas
with an air-breather drive, you'd still have something.

I think the general signal here is, you cannot plan to
"burn and bury" archives in the traditional way. But
will have to "juggle" them, bouncing them from one
kind of media to another, as the need arises.

Paul