• AnyStream is having some DRM issues currently, Netflix is not available in HD for the time being.
    Situations like this will always happen with AnyStream: streaming providers are continuously improving their countermeasures while we try to catch up, it's an ongoing cat-and-mouse game. Please be patient and don't flood our support or forum with requests, we are working on it 24/7 to get it resolved. Thank you.

Discussion Storage options (at least what I do)

It's far more complicated... M-Discs might be more resistant regarding aging and decomposing. But the issue starts in the first place burning them and get good burns. Bad burns will be the the first cause of failures. Aging, scratches etc. will add to it. To produce the best discs read this. The results also depend on the combination - disc media quality- burner type -burn speed:
https://forum.redfox.bz/threads/the...urn-results-with-50gb-100gb-bd-r-dl-tl.86133/
These days this is quite outdated and more expensive compared to store on HDD. It's faster and cheaper. But you need redundancy by making backups (yes, you would need that with discs as well and you would need to burn at least a second disc). So. Burning discs is obsolete. HDD is the way to go. Most likely in 3 to 4 years it will be SSD instead of HDD. I recently provided a chart that is forecasting that the prices of SSD per GB will be lower than compared to HDD.
 
coopervid said:
It's far more complicated... M-Discs might be more resistant regarding aging and decomposing. But the issue starts in the first place burning them and get good burns. Bad burns will be the the first cause of failures. Aging, scratches etc. will add to it. To produce the best discs read this. The results also depend on the combination - disc media quality- burner type -burn speed:
https://forum.redfox.bz/threads/the...urn-results-with-50gb-100gb-bd-r-dl-tl.86133/
These days this is quite outdated and more expensive compared to store on HDD. It's faster and cheaper. But you need redundancy by making backups (yes, you would need that with discs as well and you would need to burn at least a second disc). So. Burning discs is obsolete. HDD is the way to go. Most likely in 3 to 4 years it will be SSD instead of HDD. I recently provided a chart that is forecasting that the prices of SSD per GB will be lower than compared to HDD.
Click to expand...

...I'm fairly certain I've had this exact same conversation with you on these forums in the past. And if not you or these forums, I've definitely heard the "HDDs are better than burned disks" argument phrased the exact same way five or six times. Hard Drive Acolytes travel around the internet proselytizing their beliefs.

And so, I propose a challenge: I will take all of my most important data and burn it to an mdisc. You take all your most important data and save it to a hard drive. We'll put my disk and your drive on a shelf and leave them there for 100 years. In 2123 Our descendants can take them down and see which one faired better: the product explicitly designed to last forever, or the one designed to work for 5 years tops :p
 
You better save more than the discs and the HDD, what are you going to play it on in 2123? Certainly not A 5:25 disc drive or a PC. Where do you think you will find one, maybe a museum?:)
 
RedFox 1 said:
You better save more than the discs and the HDD, what are you going to play it on in 2123? Certainly not A 5:25 disc drive or a PC. Where do you think you will find one, maybe a museum?:)
Click to expand...

Did you know you can still buy a brand new microfilm reader on Amazon? Or that there are still companies actively producing microfilms? This 170 year old technology is still perfectly useable today without going in a museum.

Mdisc was invented to do for computer files what microfilm does for documents. 100 years from now the form factor might change, but when you build a long-term archival solution and it sees widespread adoption, the tools to use it continue being produced.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
...I'm fairly certain I've had this exact same conversation with you on these forums in the past. And if not you or these forums, I've definitely heard the "HDDs are better than burned disks" argument phrased the exact same way five or six times. Hard Drive Acolytes travel around the internet proselytizing their beliefs.

And so, I propose a challenge: I will take all of my most important data and burn it to an mdisc. You take all your most important data and save it to a hard drive. We'll put my disk and your drive on a shelf and leave them there for 100 years. In 2123 Our descendants can take them down and see which one faired better: the product explicitly designed to last forever, or the one designed to work for 5 years tops :p
Click to expand...
Funny. I only want it to store for me and not my grand-grand-grandchildren. Now take the other approach. Go back 40 years to 1983. 360k floppies. Then 1.2 MB floppies. 1.44 MB floppies. Tape backup. DAT tape backup. CDs. DVDs. BDs. Did all that. Been there. Your best option is to hammer hieroglyphs in some rocks. Read through the link I provided. tectpro did some really good testing. Don't believe the sales pitch for M-Discs. The discs may last that long but the process to make them lasting that long is far from perfect. And data readability is just another story.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
Did you know you can still buy a brand new microfilm reader on Amazon? Or that there are still companies actively producing microfilms? This 170 year old technology is still perfectly useable today without going in a museum.

Mdisc was invented to do for computer files what microfilm does for documents. 100 years from now the form factor might change, but when you build a long-term archival solution and it sees widespread adoption, the tools to use it continue being produced.
Click to expand...
We had a company in town who took over the promises of a big producer of magnetic tapes. They guaranteed 50 years of support of the data recording technology. The company shut down production of magnetic tapes and a one-man-company took over.
 
coopervid said:
We had a company in town who took over the promises of a big producer of magnetic tapes. They guaranteed 50 years of support of the data recording technology. The company shut down production of magnetic tapes and a one-man-company took over.
Click to expand...

Yeah. And this does happen. Maybe mdisc won't end up being the new microfilm. Who knows? All I know is for now its a better LONG TERM archival solution than hard disks.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
Yeah. And this does happen. Maybe mdisc won't end up being the new microfilm. Who knows? All I know is for now its a better LONG TERM archival solution than hard disks.
Click to expand...
Prove! How you do that? HDD backup and having multiple copies on different HDDs is the industry standard. And what's industry standard can't be worse for personal use. I'm out now. You are too much influenced by the M-Disc sales pitch.
 
Your hard disk is slated by the manufacturer to last for 5 years. Read the warranty. Even a normal DVDR beats that by 3x.

The core disagreement here is you are conflating live storage with a long-term archival solution. People have movies saved that they may go ten years at a time without watching. They want a media format that can comfortably sit on a shelf with no power, without needing to be replaced, with no maintenance, etc, etc, etc, for decades.

That's not hard drives.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
Your hard disk is slated by the manufacturer to last for 5 years. Read the warranty. Even a normal DVDR beats that by 3x.

The core disagreement here is you are conflating live storage with a long-term archival solution. People have movies saved that they may go ten years at a time without watching. They want a media format that can comfortably sit on a shelf with no power, without needing to be replaced, with no maintenance, etc, etc, etc, for decades.

That's not hard drives.
Click to expand...
You are just biased. I don't know why. And a HDD sitting on a shelf does not consume power.
 
Well so sit back, cuz this is gonna be a long-un...

I've been hoarding data for about 23 years now. Its always been my desire to "cut the cord" so to speak, to have access to a large media library without the need for cable or internet streaming. I've been storing my data on hard disks off and on for the past 23 years and have lost much of it due to drive failures. Sometimes its on the backups, sometimes it isn't. Thems the breaks.

I've always thought having a separate ARCHIVE(look up the difference between an archive and a backup if you are unfamiliar) to store my most precious files would be a good idea. My Archival solution has the following requirements:

-Designed for that purpose
-Shelf-stable(think "leave it in the back of a closet for 20 years" stable)
-No ongoing fees or maintenance
-Low cost
-Offline

So, let's look at some options:

Hard drives - cheap, but not shelf-stable, not designed to be used for personal archives. If you keep it spinning it'll last about 5 years. You can get more time out of one if you store it properly(stable temperature, low humidity) and perform regular maintenance(spin the drive up once or twice a year). Then at best you can get maybe 15 years off the drive. Great for the data you use every day, good for backups, not an acceptable archive solution.

Tapes - designed expressly for this purpose, but very expensive. Especially for larger formats. I've experimented with various tape drives over the years with limited success. A tape backup did once save my skin when an HDD failed, so that was nice. But over all its just too expensive for a consumer-level archive.

Online backups - a good option, but if the monthly fee should lapses, your data goes bye-bye. So fails my requirement on several counts.

Flash memory - its good but the costs add up, also the technology wasn't designed for this purpose so we really don't know how a drive will fair if left in a drawer until the mid-2040s. I'm thinking long-term, here.

So that brings us around to optical disks. There are a couple of competing formats in the long-term archival spectrum. Most never actually made it to market. There are some options that are superior to m-disc but cost more and are "iffy" when it comes to long-term support for the product. But m-disc offers a badly over-looked key advantage: Mormons. The technology was invented at BYU and is being used by the Mormon church to store genealogy data. That means the product's success on the open market doesn't matter as much as how well it works for the people who built it. If it proves valuable in that niche role, we will continue to see readers and writers produced indefinitely. Maybe not in very large quantities or for very good prices, but its still probably the best bet for my lifetime.



So that's all the reasoning.

Now we get into what I actually do: my main data store is (shocker) a NAS where I store all my live data on 2x8tb drives in RAID1. My offline backup is a third 8tb HD attached to a smart plug which I turn on and sync periodically. My ARCHIVE is a stack of 100tb m-discs sitting in the back of my closet, where I save a 4th copy all my favorite movies, shows, and personal files. Also a copy of Horizon Zero Dawn because its my fiancé's favorite game. My most important documents are even backed up to microfilm. Yes. I am that hardcore of an archivist. Probably next year I'll be adding an online backup to the mix in case my house burns down(a very real possibility seeing as my lovely fiancé just HAS to have a gas powered stove).

So there you have it, my four(five?) pronged solution to ready data, backups, and archives.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top