A comparison of PS3 and 360 as media players

[patsu]

Archival and backup are 2 different concepts: Backup for high-speed copy and restore to minimize the impact of failures, human error or disaster; and archiving to organize data for retention (long term).

Blu-ray would be for archival purposes. Its use will depend on cost and convenience. Too early to judge now. My main use would be to "freeze" many huge (32Gb) and carefully crafted VM images to Blu-ray because I don't want anyone else including myself to mess them up.

Consumer grade HDD crashed too often. And I sometimes overwrite the VMs accidentally. In general, the HDDs and Flash drives are better for quick access.

 

[joker454]

Once you have a family and an hd video camera, you will be video taping everything. Once the memory card on the video camera is full, you will need to move the videos somewhere. You can trust it all to just hard drives, but given that precious memories are irreplaceable I'd say that you would want more backup than that. Enter blank blurays. We don't have kids yet, but we already have ~200gb of hd home videos, a number that will substantially grow once we do have kids. Plus I'm paranoid about backups of family videos, so I keep everything backed up on a raid drive, on a separate portable 1tb hard drive, and on optical blurays. Finally, I make blurays to give to other family members. For example, I video taped a baptism on my hd video camera. I made a bluray of that baptism, complete with menus, and have it stored as a ~14gb iso. From that iso I burn bluray movies for whoever needs them. Ok...so not many family members have bluray players just yet, but eventually they will.

 

[Asher]

Archival and backup are 2 different concepts: Backup for high-speed copy and restore to minimize the impact of failures, human error or disaster; and archiving to organize data for retention (long term).

Blu-ray would be for archival purposes. Its use will depend on cost and convenience. Too early to judge now. My main use would be to "freeze" many huge (32Gb) and carefully crafted VM images to Blu-ray because I don't want anyone else including myself to mess them up.

Consumer grade HDD crashed too often. And I sometimes overwrite the VMs accidentally. In general, the HDDs and Flash drives are better for quick access.

Saving to a disc is far more risky for long-term backups and archives than HDD. Consumer-grade NAS or RAIDs are ridiculously cheap now.

I've been burned in the past for using CD-Rs for backups, and after a few years of storage the discs became unreadable.

There's just not real point to optical disk backup anymore. It's inconvenient, it's slow, and it's unreliable.

 

[specwarGP2]

Is the idea of Blu Ray burnable media going to really catch on to nearly the extent of DVD/CD writeable media? It seems we've come full cicle from Zip drive -> CD -> DVD -> Flash USB pendrive/external HDDs as the way I see it. Does anyone see it any differently?

Flash media will never be cheaper per GB than BD, and people will always pick the cheaper option when they need to archive large amounts of data.

 

[joker454]

Flash media will never be cheaper per GB than BD, and people will always pick the cheaper option when they need to archive large amounts of data.

Plus they are good for off site backups. I keep hdd backups at home, but if disaster strikes like if we get robbed or the house burns down then we won't lose our years of video memories because I keep the optical blurays as backups offsite.

 

[patsu]

Saving to a disc is far more risky for long-term backups and archives than HDD. Consumer-grade NAS or RAIDs are ridiculously cheap now.

I've been burned in the past for using CD-Rs for backups, and after a few years of storage the discs became unreadable.

There's just not real point to optical disk backup anymore. It's inconvenient, it's slow, and it's unreliable.

I don't know man. 2 of my NASes failed after 2-3 years. It's ridiculous alright

These days, I keep multiple copies of critical data. Besides, those data are not supposed to be altered. I changed the copies accidentally a few times already. Blu-ray would be a good fit for me.

 

[Squilliam]

Flash media will never be cheaper per GB than BD, and people will always pick the cheaper option when they need to archive large amounts of data.

At a consumer level I was wondering whether BR writers would catch on to the same extent as DVD-Writers did. I wonder about this because it seems that consumers at least are moving back towards flash based media instead of burning optical discs.

 

[-tkf-]

Saving to a disc is far more risky for long-term backups and archives than HDD. Consumer-grade NAS or RAIDs are ridiculously cheap now.

I've been burned in the past for using CD-Rs for backups, and after a few years of storage the discs became unreadable.

There's just not real point to optical disk backup anymore. It's inconvenient, it's slow, and it's unreliable.

Both "harddrive" backups and Optical Media is pretty much useless for any kind of backup.

For me there is 2 options, tape or online storage.
Tape is by far the best option if you want control yourself, online backup is the easiest but you have no idea what is going on in terms of actually security.

I hope that google is gonna do something real about the rumoured G-Drive and reduce their price on storage even more.

 

[BRiT]

There are 2 types of hard drives: those that have failed and those that will fail. All hard drives will fail. If you think otherwise, you're delusional.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

That might be true, but I don't recall ever experiencing failure in my lifetime. I have some crusty old 2-8GB HDDs around here and they all work. Not that I have any use for them. But for archiving, wanting a 50 year backup, I don't think there is any viable consumer-grade solution is there? Nothing exists that's been tested that long anyhow!

 

[specwarGP2]

At a consumer level I was wondering whether BR writers would catch on to the same extent as DVD-Writers did. I wonder about this because it seems that consumers at least are moving back towards flash based media instead of burning optical discs.

Eventually they will. What joker posted earlier is a glimpse into the near future. Once HD video recorders become mainstream BD will be the preferred choice to store that data since HD cameras record AVCHD and the most widespread device that can playback AVCHD are BD players (and PS3). Furthermore for archival purposes it seems a lot easier to label a disk (eg: Timmy's birthday party 12 DEC 02), than an SD card or USB drive.

 

[-tkf-]

That might be true, but I don't recall ever experiencing failure in my lifetime. I have some crusty old 2-8GB HDDs around here and they all work. Not that I have any use for them. But for archiving, wanting a 50 year backup, I don't think there is any viable consumer-grade solution is there? Nothing exists that's been tested that long anyhow!

LTO-4 is supposed to last 30 years.

Question is if you can find hardware that can read it after 30 years

 

[joker454]

Both "harddrive" backups and Optical Media is pretty much useless for any kind of backup.

For me there is 2 options, tape or online storage.
Tape is by far the best option if you want control yourself, online backup is the easiest but you have no idea what is going on in terms of actually security.

I hope that google is gonna do something real about the rumoured G-Drive and reduce their price on storage even more.

How expensive is it to backup to tape? I can backup 25gb for $1.50 (currently) on bluray, what's the equivalent tape media cost? Tapes are also magnetic, so they are subject to similar fail issues as hard drives, in the magnetic sense. I'm ultimately more comfortable having both magnetic and optical backups just in case. I don't think online storage would work for video. I have a pretty good isp, and my upload speed is just 100k/sec. It would take eons to upload 25gb of video every time I left a family event!

I think more and more software will eventually support burning to blu-ray straight from video camera. Vegas Video already does this, I'm sure more will in the future. I also suspect at some point the video cameras themselves will do it, where you film what you want, connect it to PC via usb, and burn straight to a blu-ray right from the camera. They have to because we're talking about mountains of video data. I was at a friends place yesterday for just 4 hours, in that little time I filmed 8.4gb of video. It really adds up fast! For that one I'll be lazy and just drag the files to Vegas Video and click "burn blu-ray disc", letting it handle everything for me. Point and click blu-rays for $1.50

That might be true, but I don't recall ever experiencing failure in my lifetime.

You must be the luckiest man alive! I've had every brand and every type fail on me, everything from an 80mb MFM hard drive, scsi's, eide's, sata's, you name it, tons of failures from everybrand.

 

[-tkf-]

How expensive is it to backup to tape? I can backup 25gb for $1.50 (currently) on bluray, what's the equivalent tape media cost? Tapes are also magnetic, so they are subject to similar fail issues as hard drives, in the magnetic sense. I'm ultimately more comfortable having both magnetic and optical backups just in case. I don't think online storage would work for video. I have a pretty good isp, and my upload speed is just 100k/sec. It would take eons to upload 25gb of video every time I left a family event!

I think more and more software will eventually support burning to blu-ray straight from video camera. Vegas Video already does this, I'm sure more will in the future. I also suspect at some point the video cameras themselves will do it, where you film what you want, connect it to PC via usb, and burn straight to a blu-ray right from the camera. They have to because we're talking about mountains of video data. I was at a friends place yesterday for just 4 hours, in that little time I filmed 8.4gb of video. It really adds up fast! For that one I'll be lazy and just drag the files to Vegas Video and click "burn blu-ray disc", letting it handle everything for me. Point and click blu-rays for $1.50

A 800GB tape is 40 dollars. But the drive is kind a expensive @2000 dollars , i dunno what happend to consumer tape backups, i guess it just died a horrible death

 

[zed]

Speaking as someone who used to repair computers, ~5 an hour, so I used to see a fair few during a week

HD failures do occur but theyre certainly not near the top of the heap WRT problem causing devices, CPUs/memory/motherboards etc are worse which is strange when u think about it, HD == moving parts the others dont (excluding the fan)

 

[ShadowRunner]

LTO-4 is supposed to last 30 years.

Question is if you can find hardware that can read it after 30 years

When a media type becomes obsolete you simply transfer the archive to new media. I have had to do this several times going from DLT4 > LTO1 > LTO2 > LTO4. Hoping media will last 30 years and only keeping 1 copy is asking for trouble.

Both "harddrive" backups and Optical Media is pretty much useless for any kind of backup.

For me there is 2 options, tape or online storage.
Tape is by far the best option if you want control yourself, online backup is the easiest but you have no idea what is going on in terms of actually security.

I hope that google is gonna do something real about the rumoured G-Drive and reduce their price on storage even more.

Disk is a viable option for backups, especially with data deduplication and remote replication.

 

[Asher]

I don't know man. 2 of my NASes failed after 2-3 years. It's ridiculous alright

These days, I keep multiple copies of critical data. Besides, those data are not supposed to be altered. I changed the copies accidentally a few times already. Blu-ray would be a good fit for me.

Multiple copies is why NAS RAIDs are essential. You said two of your NASes failed, I'm assuming they were not RAID NAS? If so, there's really no point unless it's worthless data.

The best way for home backup is a RAID NAS enclosure. You can have harddrives die, controllers die, and you'll still have your data. The only thing it doesn't cover is off-site backups.

It's a lot more convenient and reliable than saving to disc. I'm in the process of building an 8TB RAID5 NAS. It'll count as my backup as well as a DLNA server for watching media on my PS3.

 

[patsu]

Ha ha, yes. One of them is software RAID.

I carry some of my portable HDDs around too, but carrying a Blu-ray disc in some cases is safer and lighter. The only problem is to wait for it to drop in price. I saw a 12x Blu-ray writer news the other day. Here's hoping for it to reduce price.

I also subscribe to Amazon S3 (A couple hundreds a month), but that sum is funded by my side business. So I'm not paying for it personally.

 

[Asher]

If it was a software RAID, then I'm assuming you had no data loss as you rebuilt?

 

[patsu]

That's besides the point. It's supposed to not fail (the way it did). It died twice, and the second time it wouldn't start even after the first rescue. I didn't have time to fix it, and eventually (when I finally patched and toyed with it) it's only used to store non-critical stuff and working data.