The more data I amass on my hard drives and Amazon Cloud storage (or lack thereof), the
more I get paranoid about losing it.
I don’t really have ANY files of my own prior to the last half of my high school career.
I knew nothing about data storage and couldn’t care less.
I do remember having backed things up to a MediFire, GDrive, or other probably-no-longer-existing
online service, but I have literally no way of finding the data.
I threw away discs and erased hard drives.
It sucks, and I don’t want it to happen again.
I’m EposVox - here to make tech easier and more fun with free educational videos - and
today I’ll be walking you through one of the steps of my data backup and management
plan - setting up cold storage on BluRay discs.
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Before we begin, I want to give a quick shoutout to the people over at the DataHoarder SubReddit
and my buddy SirCrest for helping me fine-tune the details of how I wanted to go about this.
For this process, I picked up a 50-pack of Verbatim 25GB BD-R 6x speed discs.
I specifically chose this set because they use in-organic dyes, which will break down
much less over time compared to other discs, and the “hard coat” tech that Verbatim
uses is fairly difficult to scratch overall - which is important to these discs being
able to serve as practical long-term backup.
Backing up to optical media is a pretty controversial topic.
Many over on the subreddit claimed super short life span and easy corrupt-ability of disc
media - and yet I have CDs and DVDs of various games and data that I burned over 10 years
ago that still work fine today.
For cold storage that ideally will never be needed, I’m happy with the medium - just
make sure you’re storing them in safe, indoors conditions.
You can use the spindle the blank discs came on, a soft-padded disc binder, plastic cases,
and so on.
Just make sure they’re away from direct sunlight, heat, humidity, and other harsh
conditions.
You will also need a BluRay writer drive, too, of course.
Mine also supports M-Disc, but from my research the M-Discs for BluRay aren’t much more
reliable and aren’t really as necessary compared to their DVD counterparts.
I chose 25GB discs, as they provided the best value of dollar-per-gigabyte - at about 3
cents per gigabyte and a little over 1TB of storage for the $40 50-pack I bought.
Since we’re not burning movies, we don’t need to worry about the cost per disc - we
just want the cost per GB of storage we can use for backup.
I’ve primarily focused on backing up my pictures and my music collection so far.
I used 7-Zip to create a basic dot-7-Z archive of the files, split into parts based on the
size of the BluRay disc.
There’s actually a drop-down selection for 25GB BluRays, which saved me the trouble of
calculating the exact byte amount.
There isn’t an option for 50GB discs, though.
Each part essentially filled a full disc - down to the last part.
Depending on the size of your data, of course, the last archive usually left at least a couple
gigabytes free on the disc.
I used this space for parity storage.
This would allow me - potentially - to recover some blocks of data if certain archives became
corrupt.
For the parity creation, I used a program called MultiPar.
I added the 7-Zip archives and selected 100% block allocation.
I chose “Variable size” as the sizing scheme - which creates multiple parity files
of various sizes instead of a single file.
This was on the recommendation of a few articles - though their focus was on using QuickPar
to create parity for UseNet shares, I thought it might be worth trying here.
Then all that needs done is to use the Redundancy slider to select a recovery data size that
will fit on disc with the final archive file.
I believe with my pictures disc, the last archive split was a little over 6GB, so I
created parity files to take up the remaining 18GB or so.
But with my music collection I only had about 1GB of parity that I could fill.
Obviously, the closer to 100% you get with redundancy, the more data you can recover.
If you wanted to have full 100% redundancy you could - but then you’d be burning a
whole separate set of discs to burn the parity files instead of just filling the last disc
to not waste space.
This was my biggest challenge when I used to back up to DVDs was making full use of
all the space on each disc without sacrificing organization of the files.
This way, the extra space is going to good use, and the discs are neatly organized.
I then use IMGBurn to burn each of the main archive splits, and then the final archive
split and parity files to my BluRay discs, and tell it to verify when it’s done.
It will spit out an error if it fails verification.
Label the discs with a sharpie and you’re good to go.
You can use a regular disc binder, plastic disc cases, or sleeves to store the discs.
You can also make an easy disc sleeve from a standard piece of paper by folding the long
edges around the disc and then folding it in half - which can then be labeled and stored,
too.
This is a great way to recycle paper, too.
Personally, I plan to just use up every disc and then keep them stored on the spindle they
came on.
I won’t be touching them any time soon and they won’t get moved - so overall risk of
scratching is pretty slim, especially with that hard coating stuff.
This way I can just throw them in a closet or fire safe and rest well knowing I have
serious cold storage of my data that isn’t relying on a mechanical hard drive surviving
the test of time.
I hope you found this video helpful.
If you did, smash the like button, get subscribed for more awesome tech videos, and I’ll see
you in the next one.
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