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by bitJericho 4002 days ago
I don't know what the life of blu-rays are but burned optical cds and dvds have an estimated lifespan of only 10 years. Make sure you continue to keep up your backups! How I do it is I update my backups every few years but I also keep everything on functional and "hot" hard drives at all times (so I can see it's all still there).

There's also http://www.mdisc.com/what-is-mdisc/ but I've never used/seen it.
3 comments
dvdkhlng 4002 days ago
The common Blu-Ray media (BD-R, not BD-R LTH) discs use a non-organic dye and should be more resilient than DVD-R or CD-R media. According to this source [1] 100-150 years data retention.

Edit: note also, BD-R writers immediately read back and check written data, re-writing damaged sectors to a spare area. This in-hardware defect management should make BD-R more resilient against data corruption than DVD-R or CD-R [2].

[1] https://superuser.com/questions/251369/what-is-the-lifespan-...

[2] http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/linux/DVD+RW/Blu-ray/

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gambiting 4002 days ago
CDs and DVDs have horrible shelf life because they all use organic dyes. Some Blu-Rays do too, but you can still buy Blu-Rays with metallic dyes which should work for decades(panasonic BD-Rs are guaranteed for 50 years).

In fact, do you remember the very first, early writable CDs? They all were blue on the bottom - that's because they used a metallic dye as well, I imagine 99% of those discs will be perfectly readable today.

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slantyyz 4002 days ago
The main downside is that MDiscs have a max capacity is 25GB on the Blu-ray.

I have some myself, but I can't attest to the life span, since I've only had my BDR for about a year now. How does a normal person prove the lifespan claims of an MDiscs other than waiting?

I still find myself burning most backups to 50GB disks, and making redundant copies of only my most important stuff to the 25GB MDiscs.

Where I live, a 3 pack of 25GB MDiscs runs around $20 vs $70 for a spindle of 25 RiData 50GB discs. That's ~6.66/25GB MDisc vs ~2.80/50GB BDR. Not a huge premium for piece of mind, I guess.

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hsshah 4002 days ago
I see that they have 100GB BDXL MDisc available now. Have to invest into BDXL writer but that's just one time investment.
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