Be Excellent To Each Other

Anyone here using Blu_Ray for PC/Mac storage backup? Am thinking of possibly getting an external drive for the Mac to help solve some storage problems.

Reliable? Fast? Any brands better than others.

Cheers.

Mac officially says 'no' to blu-ray. Big Steve don't like it.

I know for a fact people are using them and Toast supports Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.

Disgracefully Final Cut Studio won't let you author Blu-Ray discs which is a fucking shambles frankly. But burning them is apparently no big issue.

I wouldn't trust optical disks for backups, most of my DVDs are fucked.

Instead I've gone this way for ongoing external storage.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Max-Value-eSATA ... P8QMBQPYGV

Which is admittedly no help for redistribution but is likely to last far longer and of course will expand for free.

Not useful. I backup to HD + optical.

I've had a go with a blue-ray writer. It was fairly fast, and they're surprisingly cheap to buy, but the media is about £7 a disc.

Not there fault mate.


DVD licensing allowed you to make disks without copy protection. Hence making your own disks was possible. Blu-ray disks won't work without the DRM and that needs you to pay 1500 bucks. Only rom disks are excluded.

Blu-ray is far more closed than DVD (which is why it's sad HD didn't win). At best it's fucking over indie film makers at worst it's stripping your abilities as a simple pleb.

Of course thats not saying sony won't change their mind on it in the future. But banking on that and using Blu-ray to back up your data when external hard drives are probably have the same £/Gb ratio, seems a bad idea to me.

That link talks about it more - it's quite interesting [/fry]

Ahaaahhhaahahaaha! Yeah, whatever!

Understandable, but also a pain. The copyright issue is a elephant in the room but they are going to have to address it.

But if I don't use Blu-Ray as a backup then what do I use? Keeping in mind I use HD as one backup and DVD for the other at the moment. Tape? Disc costs will come down though.

Wait, so it's impossible to write video blu-ray disks at all then without paying $1,500 to put your own home movies on there?

$1500.05 actually.

I imagine that Apple or Microsoft could pay the $1500 + 5c in order to embed the ability to write them into the OS, if they chose to do so. For a major software vendor, that's peanuts. It's the little development shops that'll be fucked over by this.

Long term it won't help the format. What's aided DVD is that anyone who wants to produce content can. This meant that even very early on, even before DVD-R, small scale productions were available on DVD.

Loads of my clients distribute their videos on DVD-R (which I can duplicate in-house). People are starting to ask for HD edits to "future-proof" their productions. Restricting the format will not help take-up at all.


So for archiving then, is there such a thing as a cheap SAN where you can just slot in SATA discs as you need them?

Well there's the thing I linked but if you're thinking of something that can take multiple drives they exist but cheap is not the word.

So I keep on finding.

There must be some kind of storage solution that will work for me that doesn't cost the earth barring a huge SAN with RAID.

Guess it really is DVD's + HD. Grrrrr.

Depends on "cheap". It's not a SAN you want, it's a NAS. The Drobo is expensive, the Netgear ReadyNAS X-RAID devices a bit cheaper, but you're still not going to walk away with any change from £500 though I'm afraid.

Can't you just get a Blu-Ray drive and burn data format disks with MP4 (or whatever format you work in) files on? They'd be playable in computers but not on STBs. The equivalent to making a data DVD with MPEG-2 files on it. As I understand it, you don't need any fancy software licences to treat a BR-R as a bigger DVD-R; only the video authoring stuff needs that.

I've thought about this a lot. Think I'm going to use uncompressed HD backup, with secondary backup to DVD. The secondary backup to DVD is a pain (am just doing a 23 volume backup now) but gives a bit of peace of mind just in case an HD fails

Roxio Toast does a good job of backing up across multiple discs, although the burning is a tad slow compared to my Windows box.

Why do you need an optical backup, btw? Wouldn't two sets of HD backups be just as good, cheaper, and a lot less hassle? You could use different brand drives and so on..

http://www.mwave.com/mwave/SkuSearch_v2 ... ia=4790258

Why do I need optical backups? Well odd you should mention that.

My latest backup drive (Maxtor 500 gig) has just started making constant accessing noises, even when the SATA isn't connected. It's going to go back but if it does go pop before I copy everything off at least I have DVD backups.

DVD's are still cheaper for a secondary backup

Shitty Maxtor. Do I never learn? I have more of their drives go wrong than anyones!

Fair enough This conversation has in fact spurred me to back up my mac for the first time in about a year. All 120GB of it.