Somewhat OT: Data backup using Blu Ray

If sombody foolkills the OP all his problems will be solved ;-) Lifetime backup indeed. (well maybe mylar punched tape)

Yeah, and nearly ten years ago it was the optical cube. A one inch square device that could store several Terabytes of data by using two lasers. Entire 1GB pages could be written and read in milliseconds. It never came to pass, but they did manage to write ten GB to a roll of clear shipping tape once (a cross section of it).

That one never happened either, and it had no moving parts (other than MEMS), which means it should have been even easier, and result in a more reliable device. It did not happen..

The disc based device may well happen, but it will be years off, and data integrity will have to be spot on or the hard drive will linger for another two decades. The fact that the read surface of an optical disc can be scratched. leading to data loss, is a disqualifying factor right there alone.

There is a reason that hard drives have come as far as they have. That reason is data integrity. Despite what the dopey f*ck BobW says, they are second to NONE! Been that way for decades, and it will be that way for a long time to come. It isn't about data capacity, it is about reliable storage integrity, and these FULLY ENCLOSED devices will always have an upper hand in that area.

Even though optical is non contact, burned media is not actually "burned". It is a plastic layer which merely gets impinged upon by the laser. No actual "pit" is actually made. This plastic layer can lose that definition, even on write once disc media.

As far as Sony's new technology goes, we have always known that holographic storage technology is what it would take to get higher capacity on optical, but the same drawbacks still linger. Those drawbacks are deal breakers in oh so many scenarios. The main one being true write on the fly capacity. Most discs need to be authored in "sessions" which means a complete datagram gets written. They are not friendly with single file write scenarios... at all...

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Youy work in electronics, John. Do you really mean to say that you are unfamiliar with hard drive ESD vulnerabilities? That is what caused BobW's retarded loss of data on his precious "drives in storage", I'll bet. (actually, I'll bet it was aBOBination that did it)

Most new hard drives come with little caddies that protect the drive in the shipping/display box.

Place your drive in an ESD bag, WITH a desiccant pack (yes they ARE cheap), and then place the drive inside the shipping caddy your new drive came in. Place it in that drive's box, and shelve it with a tag attached to the box stating what is in it, and where what the box originally contained is located in the case the box is needed for a return.

Me? I have them lying around the house.. a few here... a few there. I have never had a problem. I currently have about 3TB that is live right now, and I have a couple TB in older interface models. I have a couple TB in USB attached drives that I can pass between my PS3 and my PC at will, or anywhere else (like a firesafe) for that matter.

So, I should take more care with my drives, but when I change one out, I make sure that I have all I need off the old drive, that way, I know I can safely use or give away the drive without worry.

I have also used them for shipping cartons. I hollowed out the guts of one so that I could send a certain type of vegetable contraband to a friend across country. Such parcels can show up on an xray in most shipping packaging. Not, however, when I use my hard drive shipper! Then, it looks like I am sending a hard drive. Absolutely works.

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I'm traveling, so not near my desk. I thought I could find the Sony info via Google, but either I've got the manufacturer wrong, or ?? I do know the multi-laser solution (broadcast) that was demo'ed was in production.

That said, my Google-ing did turn up an interesting innovation. Using Sony XDCAM disks, another company was able to cram 33TB onboard using only a blue laser. See:

When I get back home, I'll post the link to the Sony Broadcast product. As I recall, they were in the process of engineering all the meta stream & DRM issues to be "compatible" with the multi-laser storage media. Sounds pretty techincal, if you ask me....

-mpm

I use a similar setup. I keep my data on several hard drives in several machines and move it to a new hard drive when replacing a hard drive. This way I'm sure the data can always be read. I did buy a 1 TB USB hard drive to be able to bring a backup outside -well thats the plan-. Its amazing how cheap these things are these days. I paid 95 euro for it (including taxes).

It's nice how the capacity of the current "typical" hard drive magically expands to accomodate the size of the archive. I use a program called dirvish. It uses a feature of linux (hardlinks) so that backups are incremental and yet all copies are fully accessable online as complete directory trees. So I have daily copies going back 15 days, then weekly ones before that, then monthlies, then annual.

But I do remember when everything fitted onto one floppy.