App for mass R3D to Bluray backups ?

[Les Dittert]

Now that a 25Gig BD blank is about $0.80 , I want to burn my r3d's onto stacks of these.
I hate tape. Learned from the old DLT days. There will be thousands of BD players available in 10 years. There will be only a few LT-x drives, because BD players outsell tapedrives 100,000+ to 1.

I've searched and searched, but can't find this app:

A windows app to point to a folder on a drive and hit 'backup all' .
Direct to BD burner, not to intermediate file.
Not zipped , just the native r3d files as is.
Prompts for next disk.
Verifies.

Someone must have this app, it seems so obvious.
Anyone know?

 

[Marc Wielage]

My belief is that no optical disc format is suitable for longterm backup. You need to go to LTO, which is the only thing that's standardized and proven. (And even it's not 100%.)

I try to operate on Peter Krogh's 3-2-1 Backup Rule: 3 copies of your data, stored on 2 separate kinds of media, with 1 stored off-site (out of your office). Hard drives and LTO would be reasonable, with sets stored in different locations.

 

[Les Dittert]

I have a box of DLT tapes that were the LTO of the day. They are 10 years old. Not sure if my old drive still works. And do I still have the differential SCSI card ? And the card slot type to put it in ?

In 10 years , I will be able to wrangle an old BD player from ebay, because they sold tens of millions of them. Consumer item. LTO will be a rare bird IT item, as consumers never had them.
This is what I'm thinking.
Tapes need to be rewound every once in a while. BD's stored in a cool place, dry, should last a long time. Freezer?
I can test the error bit rate of my BD disks, to see if there is trouble before they fail to read. Can I do that with LTO tapes ?
( I'm talking about the levels of error correction used to make it still readable *before* it's not .BD lets me see if it's error rate is getting worse, which I like to track)

Anyways, I don't want to talk merits of BD/tape here , I'm just looking for a backup software app to burn them is all.

 

[Les Dittert]

I found "DVDspan" that is close to what I wanted. Works on BD disks, but it does not verify if I let it do the burning itself. It can make ISO's to burn with alternate app, that can then verify.

In case someone finds this in a search....

 

[Marc Wielage]

I have a box of DLT tapes that were the LTO of the day. They are 10 years old. Not sure if my old drive still works. And do I still have the differential SCSI card ? And the card slot type to put it in ?

DTF is another dead backup format. It's not that easy to revive a DTF2, and those were very, very widely used 10 years ago.

In 10 years , I will be able to wrangle an old BD player from ebay, because they sold tens of millions of them. Consumer item.

Not if it's trying to play a data disk. Good luck with that. You assume that the chemical layer won't change over time. I'm not convinced that this will work.

You might want to read the Motion Picture Academy's "Digital Dilemma" paper on the problems faced by people trying to backup data-based motion pictures for a long period if time. It's a very sobering issue, one for which there are no easy (or cheap) answers.

 

[MichaelP]

The same argument can be said of mounting DVD drivers in 10 - 20 years. LTO is pretty clear on their specs - each new version will read two previous versions. So LTO-5 will read back to LTO-3. Content owners and archive managers need to manage their archive migration over the years as they see sun setting of existing backup formats being used. This is an exponential and overlapping problem year on year... A great overview of all issues concerned have been detailed in the The Digital Dlimma 2 document by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences: http://www.oscars.org/science-technology/council/projects/digitaldilemma2/index.html

That being said, Sony just started showing a 4 disc BD backup system. More details at NAB I'm sure.

Michael

 

[Paul Russell]

Optical? No, never.

Get some 1TB portable hard drives and make 3 copies. Store them in 3 seperate places anywhere you like so long as it's cool, dry and not under a pylon. After three years, resurrect them and consolidate them over to 10TB drives.

In ten years you might be able to use SSD, which will probably be the best backup medium of all.

 

[Les Dittert]

I agree, the answer is to save in a couple of different methods, and spread the data to different locations.
I'll use BD to two brands of media and hard drives. With the cost of one LTO drive I can get a lot of such media.
After DLT I'm done with tape.

The nice thing about Bluray is you can monitor the bit level degradation . I don't know if LTO has a utility for that, but even if it did, I wouldn't like to wind the tape to read it out.
Plus I like disk based because it's easy to get to a particular file without winding to it first.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

It's always hard to predict what the future will hold for reading and managing media. Blu-Ray is a viable medium now that the prices have fallen to reasonable $$/GB levels. Blu-Ray discs are made from the same materials/substrates and optical compounds as CDs and DVDs. Their longevity is a known quantity to some extent. Many of the original CD-R discs from 20 years ago are no longer readable. Dyes/substrates have improved since then and have added to the lifespan somewhat. DVDs, and even more so with Blu-Ray discs, will have shorter lifespans due to the higher data density and the less physical change needed to induce corruption. I would still bank on 12 to 15 years as a base standard for BD media lifespan.

Being able to read BD discs or LTO-4 or LTO-5 in 10 to 15 years is not going to be a problem. Nero software is a good disc burning option on Windows, if you're on Mac, there's Toast. Those help organize and create data discs. You can always just do it right on your desktop, but then you have to manually fiddle with what goes where to maximize disk usage.

The most often identified weakness with the digital medium is the longevity and reliability of the storage media itself. If you look at this pragmatically, it actually can be flipped and viewed as a strength of sorts. Digital information can be copied and copied again, never incurring any loss of quality. With each iteration of storage technology comes increased reliability, ease of management and higher density. A proper data archive is one that is continuously progressed over time always being copied to newer and better forms of media to ensure its survival through redundancy and technological advancement. This is why many of us will say that data backup is not so much a technology, rather a strategy. In 1999, I purchased a few 10GB internal Travan tape drives so my web servers could do their own automated nightly backups, I could swap tapes each day on my management rounds. I moved from Travan to DLT S series, then to LTO. Currently I use a mix of LTO-4 and LTO-5 for all my backups. I can't wait for LTO-6 because my current data requirement has me writing 40+ tapes per year. That is an inflated number as there is redundancy built in, but I produced (mostly thanks to all my R3D shooting), around 17TB of data in 2010 and over 20TB in 2011. I'm just a small operation that consists of myself, and two others who help part-time.

I totally understand how Les feels about tape. The DLT systems were mostly all crap. LTO units have been proving quite reliable here. More so than optical and a lot cheaper per GB. Cheaper than HDD too and presumably better shelf life as HDD's are not meant to sit around. Not to say that I don't use HDDs... Got tons of hard drives too.