bluray 50gb rewritable still expensive?

[high_revs]

currently my back ups are only in hard drives. i have my data backed up in 3 locations (all same) plus i'm setting up 1 more external drive from a warranty replacement drive on my nas that i'm no longer going to use for the nas. i upgraded the nas drives to larger sizes. one hdd is in the safe, the other in the office.

i'll be increasing my archives since i need to scan some old docs (taxes, mortgage loan papers, and the ever growing media files for the little one - raw format photograph files - etc.). I'm considering 50gb bluray re-writables so I don't have many disks to put in the safe but the prices are still high. re-writables will allow me to keep all in the same folders when i update them. plus i'd like to keep a duplicate copy when i'm refreshing my archives in the re-writables

($3-$3.5 throwaway bd-r isn't palatable to my wallet when i have to update my archives).

other options? staying with hard drives is easier. but not quite as permanent and can be more prone to data loss from damage (like dropping it though i know though a bd-rw can be scratched too).

[clsA]

I have been using the rosewill 25gig BD-R for a couple years now it takes a little longer but i feel my entire music and picture collections are worth the effort. I get the 25 packs for around $20 @ newegg when their on sale. I also use an online backup service for some of the My Documents folder but i try to keep that under 12 gigs (free version). I have zipped password-ed copy's of my turbo-tax records and a few other docs on dropbox and box.net in case of a real disaster

[high_revs]

yeah, i can do some free service too and encrypt the files. I'm sure if I narrow it down to critical stuff, I can keep the size low. I'd probably have 20 or a little more of the 25gb bd-r. i was just looking at 50gb re-writable because i'd like to refresh the data now and then and not have to throw away those bd-r. sure i can increment only with another new bd-r, but that would mean files are in different bd-r as opposed to an entire folder (as an example).

[yellowsulphur]

I found this on Amazon. Kinda spendy, but it comes out to about $7/disk.
http://www.amazon.com/Panasonic-Rewr.../dp/B007F1QPOC

[high_revs]

yeah.. saw that (using my cgf amazon link of course!). guess that is the expected price for now.

[ExtremeX]

The costs of R and RWs have come down quite a bit, I remember paying $1/gig for RW when I first for my burner.

I tried the bluray for backup at one point and found it to be a little cumbersome when I had to constantly keep updating the backups. I think it’s great for archiving data which is old or stays static. I also found overtime it’s hard to keep to a backup schedule, I tend to let backups lapse a few months at a time.

For my own sanity I just use Acronis backup software and just backup my entire file server to a remote location. It happened daily, automatically, and I get an e-mail confirmation when it’s done.

[high_revs]

hey extremex, i actually use acronis too. i figure my bluray would be like every quarter update. while my tertiary hdd backup is more regular than that.

i don't have quite a automatic remote setup but a manual one (leave one hdd @ work).

[ExtremeX]

That’s good to know… Its excellent software and it works very well. I may be a little bias as I am an Acronis Partner, but their solutions work very well for me.

My situation is a little unique as I am the IT guy for the company I work at… I just setup an always up IPSec VPN to work, and allocated some space for myself on the company file server. I just allow the software to do its job and push all my data though the internet for remote backup. I haven’t touched an external hard drive or removable media in over a couple years for backups.

You may want to try their Cloud Storage free trial option for 1 month. It’s somewhat affordable around $50/year for 250 GB space… Setup a GFS backup scheme and allow everything to manage itself. You could use this for daily backups and then archive things to disc if needed or for space management.

If you need help or have questions just shoot me a PM

[dynamomark80]

if you are constantly backing up data I would never go the route that requires a disc media. I would look into a NAS that runs a RAID setup. you will have a very secure and redundant storage system. If you ran a 4 hard drive setup you could run RAID 10 giving you good performance and good redundancy. It acts as one drive but its really 2 drives with data divided on them and the other 2 drive are just copies (mirrors) or the first 2 so if any one fails it has an identical copy.

Cd/dvd/bluray disc get really costly if you backup data every week. If you looking to makes backing up data easy and cheaper in the long run go with a RAID set up and password protect it while you are at it. much easier, secure, and redundant then any disc based backup. One you setup the drive you can schedule backups at a a certain time through Windows and be done with making time to pop a disc in. I have my backups done every Sunday at 6am since Im never using the PC at that time anyway.