Using Blu-ray M-Disk as Backup of Last Resort

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• Hacker News
• Neither TFA or the comments seem to start with the two most obvious rules: Digital data can be perfectly replicated and it can be checksummed. Those should be the pillars of any backup. Regular transfer to new physical media and check.
  by a96
• Does anyone use it for family photo backup for generation to pass on? I am struggling to come up with a good back up solution that last ages.
  by antimora
• > In case of a catastrophic fire for example, both the computer and backup drive could be destroyed.

  I just keep my offsite backup drives in my office drawer. There is a note on them that says they are personal backup and not to be plugged into company equipment. If you have an office this is probably the easiest solution.

  If a disaster wipes out my home and my office then there are bigger things to worry about than my data.

  by qurren
• Did this experiment and it works but with caveats:

  1. The disks bigger than 50GB require a BDXL drive to read, which means spending $300 on a disk player. Which also means rare to find in the future. So if you want larger compatibility use 50GB or smaller M-disk.

  2. Japan sells supposedly original MDisk but they look rather black than gold, so they are not the original. Still strength and longevity is quite good on Blu-ray.

  3. Storing the disk on materials that degrade like cloth/plastic sleeves may be counterproductive. I got a hard case but it takes effort and is increasingly hard to find.

  Still the 50GB play nicely even on old players.

  by dzink
• Sealed pelican case has decent precedent. A small regional bank I was aware of used basically this exact strategy. There were couriers going between branches daily, so it was easy to cross-ship a sealed DR/backup box to a remote branch every day. It stayed in the remote vault until its return journey
  by oasisbob
• I have created an archive on 100-Gb M-disk sealed in a tempered glass enclosure. Placed it in on a tiny island in the White sea.

  https://www.tautology2.net/2022/12/14/where-will-the-arrow-o...

  by ati
• Are Verbatim's M-Disc Blu-Rays still really M-Disc? There was something about how they changed the recipe a few years ago, and the counter-argument was that Blu-Ray discs are non-organic anyway, which was the main feature of M-Disc DVD.
  by big85
• I debated doing this recently but ultimately spent a lot of money on an LTO-6 tape drive instead, just due to the cost efficiency over time for larger amounts of data. I justified it to myself as I needed to either expand my NAS or clear stuff off it, and the drive was the same price as buying two new HDDs to expand the NAS thanks to the obscene price inflation at the moment. As I’d likely need to further expand my NAS next year (I’m shooting a lot of photo and video) I think this works out a much more cost effective way of storing this data long term when I likely don’t need to access it much.
  by robotmay