TLDR: Download your content offline before it gets lost forever.
From now on you should never trust online hosting, I started seeing a lot of piracy sources( Streaming websites, torrent indexes,… Etc) get shut down.
So I highly recommend for all pirates to download anything they want offline to reuse and don’t trust keeping it online, sadly for me, a lot of material had been lost as there is almost no online service or piracy service has it( I am talking about material that is 5-10 years old.).
I know that this is not the first time piracy websites/hosts gets taken down but this time feels different as it became aggressive and I feel that in the next months a considerable amount of content are going to be lost.
Building a NAS is a large upfront cost but it’s worth it IMO. Giant HDDs are fairly cheap now and you can use cool filesystems like Btrfs to combat bit flips from cosmic rays and the like. I’m not sure I’d trust a dye based optical media, but there are apparently some archive quality 100 year BD-R. Most have a drastically shorter lifespan, though.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/pioneer-new-blu-ray-recorder-and-bdr-promise-100-years-lifespan
Too much of a hassle. With discs, they can be transported far easier than a NAS + drives and they can be compartmentalized and distributed to other people easier than with a NAS.
I wouldn’t trust dye-based optical media either. The BD-R discs I use incorporate an inorganic writable layer that’s rated for 100+ year storage under ideal conditions. BD-R discs are WORM (write once, read many times) so they cannot be re-written-- another massive benefit for archival purposes.
The author of this article did a very poor job at researching the subject matter. There’s zero mention of things like the difference between HTL vs LTH, or things like Verbatim’s MABL layers. There’s a good reason why one form of preferred media storage archivists use is BD-R. Let’s take the 100+ year ratings with a grain of salt, and assume say… 50 years. The average hard drive can be relied on for about 10 years. You can see where I’m going with this, which is why I’m far more comfortable using BD-R discs with HTL/MABL for long term data storage instead of hard drives which would have to be replaced every 10 years or so.
I’ve seen that Canadian govt link passed around on other forums and I’d remind people of how painfully outdated that info is. Again, no mention of HTL, which is the big factor that significantly improves longevity and reliability. What I’ve always found really bizarre is that they single academic paper that the Canadian govt page relies on in terms of BD-R’s lifespan (Iraci 2018) is hardly adequate. If you read Iraci 2018, you’ll see how it… really isn’t based on good data or testing practices at all. I think the problem is people see a scientific citation and (understandably) assume the info is legit, but in this case scratching the surface reveals an incredibly bad research paper written by an author who appears to have very little past/future experience in that field.
^ That’s from Iraci 2018. Testing the reliability of a product should involve realistic conditions. I’d ask anyone who supports Iraci’s paper to answer this-- in what kind of remotely plausible situation would you find yourself in where conditions are 80 °C with 85% RH? Further, do you trust a paper that purports these conditions to be suitable when testing the longevity of optical media? To me, this is like testing various panes of glass by throwing them off a high rise building. Iraci’s paper is ridiculous, IMO-- and there’s a good reason why it’s been cited like 2 times in the last 6 years.
Are those the m-disc? I’ve heard they’re no longer using the inorganic layer you’re referring to, but still being sold with the same branding.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/yu4j1u/psa_verbatim_no_longer_sells_real_m_discs_now/
For me, it’s just too much risk. I don’t want to have to worry about counterfeit discs or a silent downgrade from the manufacturer. Those inorganic discs are slated to last a long time, but who really knows? A set of HDDs in RAID with a 3-2-1 backup strategy is the gold standard. HDDs do fail, and I’ve already planned for that.
You do point out some good points I didn’t consider before for BD-R, but for me, it’s NAS and sneakernet with flash drives for the homies. Hardly anyone I know has an optical drive anymore, much less a Blu-ray drive in their PC.
This is just Reddit falling for misinformation. That thread has been debunked so many times. There’s a bunch of good YouTube videos covering it but long story short, redditors noticed something odd and immediately assumed it was some huge conspiracy when it wasn’t.
And again, that 2018 paper… I encourage people to read it and see just how silly the methodology was.
Regarding the testing - Short of waiting 100 years, how else would you accelerate the degradation of the discs to simulate aging?
Not totally surprised about Reddit falling for some misunderstood labeling. Just curious about that, mainly.
However, even if they are perfect they still wouldn’t meet my needs. I couldn’t use them to share data with anyone I know, as nobody has a data Blu-ray drive. I can’t access the data on them at a whim, and they’re slower than a RAID array. I can’t easily perform automated routine data scrubbing to ensure corruption hasn’t occurred. Speaking of; how often do you verify the data on your discs, and how do you do it?
I can see its usefulness in some scenarios (cold storage), but I’m quite happy with my NAS.
I’m not sure, but I can say with certainty that increasing temps to 80C with 85% RH isn’t any kind of demonstrable way of accurately predicting longevity under realistic conditions.
If I wanted to safety test a car, it would make sense to run a series of conventional car crashes. It wouldn’t make sense to drive the car off a cliff and then claim that during testing, the car was proven to be unsafe.
I agree with a lot of other points. Personally, I just find it works better in my brain to have all media (TV shows, eBooks, movies, and music) organized on discs. Same goes with personal photos and videos. For certain things, I keep copies on my PC like photos and music, but for other things that I don’t access frequently, I prefer to have them on discs. That said, I do have a HDD backup of everything. I’d love to get another large HDD but just can’t justify the $$$.