[IYasha]

This made my sad day even sadder. Much, much so.

During past year I was preparing to fully embrace Blu-ray for cold storage. Even bought a USB3.0 controller to shove into my NAS (that silently failed to recognize it) to use with external BD writer.

Only few of discs I bought are made by Sony, but I was planning to expand that collection.

The barrier of entry into BD enthusiast territory is already quite high: you have to read dozens of forum posts worth hundreds of pages to gain somewhat reliable knowledge befor buying something reliable - drives, discs, controllers, software. But now it's one less source for blanks of acceptable quality. No doubt it will lead to rise of already high prices of BD media.

I sincerely think BDs could be way more popular if people were more educated in data storage. Most individuals and businesses have data that they would want to store and protect long-term. But, for example, I knew someone who bought regular cheap USB flash pen-drives for backup of valuable photos and stored them in a drawer. Others, more advanced failures include cheap CD-Rs, old HDDs (literally: some guys are like "my laptop HDD is too old, slow and small, I think I'll copy my most valuable information there and throw it on a shelf") and cursed cloud services. If only more people realized how fragile most data storage solutions are!

[hn92726819]

You should be glad you didn't. As someone nearing the end of a 2-month journey ripping thousands of blurays, it's sad to see how many simply no longer work. The material degrades and they become unrippable (or DRM prevents it? Or the reader doesn't work?). As you found, it's user-hostile territory and I suggest you avoid it. In my case, these were all legally collected so each one that doesn't work stings because that's about $40 that's gone forever.

I'd say maybe 10% haven't worked. Some have visibly blackened which I didn't realize was possible. Plus if you have 1tb of data to back up, you need 26 disks at the minimum!

[IYasha]

Wow! What a titanic task you've managed there! It's a pity that not even factory-stamped discs are safe from corrosion. I hope you share your stuff via torrents too.

Heh, while I wasn't a movie BD enthusiast, I'm well into data backup solutions for home. Even considered buying an LTO drive once. But backing up to 100GB discs is pretty much doable, valid solution. Except for clustering (dividing files/dirs between discs) and updates (which are only possible on BD-REs, but very time-consuming).

I also discovered DVD-RAMs recently, and not only are they darn beautiful, but very versatile and claimed to be more reliable than usual DVDs (nothing beats M-DVDs though). Good for storing project sources.