Backups of Media? How do you handle it?

[QlShdR]

btw - priced one of those 300GB tape backups - $1200.  No thanks.

I got a used LTO2 drive for 144EUR
A 200GB tape costs anywhere from 11.5EUR (appear sometimes on ebay) to 30.4EUR (available at a local store on order - arrive the next day).

The tape should hold onto its data for about 30 years. Good luck achieving that with an optical disk and especially a hard drive. Magnetooptical discs could do it, but they are more expensive and only have 128MB-9GB capacity.

A USED drive for for 144 EUR (if I find one at this price) or a brand new Plexor DL BD-W for ~110 EUR (with many years of warranty - other brands are even cheaper)...I can buy quality DL BD-discs for about 4.5 EUR/disc, or even less.
Where I live, old LTO-stuff are incredibly expensive (the hungarian average income per month is roughly 250-300 EUR (!), while 1 kgs of bread costs 0,75-1 EUR, 1 l milk costs 0,6-1 EUR and 1 l of gasoline costs ~1,3 EUR...), not to mention the new ones; they're FAR out of the average mortal's financial range. If I buy something from e-bay, it's a gamble (as I don't examine personally what I'm buying) and I need a credit card (which I don't have). Besides, there's the shipping cost too (another 10-20-30 EUR)...

Big deal. I'm gonna rewrite my backups in every 5 years for the sake of safety. The price of the BD-media will be ~1 EUR/disc or something like that. Not to mention that I'll be able to use any BD-player (which will be as common as DVD-players nowadays) to playback my files.

[Freedom Kira]

I buy from eBay all the time without a credit card. Heck, I don't have a credit card either.

It's not a gamble if you know what you're doing. In particular, the seller's feedback score is something important to check.

(Oh, and fix your end italics tag)

[QlShdR]

I buy from eBay all the time without a credit card. Heck, I don't have a credit card either.

It's not a gamble if you know what you're doing. In particular, the seller's feedback score is something important to check.

(Oh, and fix your end italics tag)

Yeah, but that's just a minor point of my previous comment.

[Freedom Kira]

What, you mean shipping cost? You can just tack it onto the price. Usually the result isn't too bad since they are competing with local suppliers (and they know it).

If you meant that you can't physically check over what you buy, of course you can't. That's why there's a feedback system - scammers are quickly revealed. You can generally trust sellers with 1000+ ratings with a score over 98%, which applies to most sellers.
I sure hope you didn't mean that you don't pay much attention to what you buy.

If you're not willing to take some small chances to save hundreds of euros, well that's your choice. But don't say there isn't a viable solution to your small income, because there is.

[Pentium100]

A USED drive for for 144 EUR (if I find one at this price) or a brand new Plexor DL BD-W for ~110 EUR (with many years of warranty - other brands are even cheaper)...I can buy quality DL BD-discs for about 4.5 EUR/disc, or even less.

Well, the drive I have is used, but the software reports that it still has 99% of head life remaining. Those things are built differently - they are enterprise-grade.
4.5EUR * 4 (since a tape holds 200GB) = 18EUR, which is in the middle of a tape price. However, since tapes hold more data, they are more convenient at least for me - less swapping and they take up less physical space while still having a label on the edge. Also, a tape is rewritable, so if I mess something up or find a better version of the TV show or whatever, I can reuse the same tape.
"Brand new" things are overrated. I bought a brand new VCR from a store and it broke after about 1.5 years (and replacing the mechanical part would be really difficult). I am still using a SVHS VCR made in 1994 that I bought on ebay (so I could edit out commercials). One capacitor in it went bad, but replacing it was easy (and cheap - the capacitor was something like 0.1EUR).

Where I live, old LTO-stuff are incredibly expensive (the hungarian average income per month is roughly 250-300 EUR (!), while 1 kgs of bread costs 0,75-1 EUR, 1 l milk costs 0,6-1 EUR and 1 l of gasoline costs ~1,3 EUR...),

In Lithuania, the average income is around 300EUR (which is a bit inflated, since there are a lot of people who get the minimum salary of 231EUR before taxes) and gasoline costs 1.3-1.4EUR/L.

not to mention the new ones; they're FAR out of the average mortal's financial range. If I buy something from e-bay, it's a gamble (as I don't examine personally what I'm buying) and I need a credit card (which I don't have). Besides, there's the shipping cost too (another 10-20-30 EUR)...

the 114EUR was with the shipping cost. I never consider shipping as separate from the price. To me, it's the same if the item costs 1EUR and the shipping is 99EUR or the item costs 100EUR and the shipping is free. In both cases I pay 100EUR.

As for the card - I have a "virtual" one, it can only be used online and it's a debit card. It is useful since I can sometimes get things cheaper on the internet than locally (and sometimes I can only get it on ebay and not locally). This is not limited to data tapes. I can't even get TDK SA audio cassettes locally and have to buy them on ebay.

But I agree - a new LTO drive costs a lot.

Big deal. I'm gonna rewrite my backups in every 5 years for the sake of safety. The price of the BD-media will be ~1 EUR/disc or something like that. Not to mention that I'll be able to use any BD-player (which will be as common as DVD-players nowadays) to playback my files.

I dislike having to rewrite the archive. I want it to be like my audio tape and record collection. I do not re-record my tapes every few years (I have one reel-to-reel tape that was recorded in 1951 - still sounds OK - I bought it on ebay ). Also, this is one of the reasons why I prefer recording music to audio tapes and cassettes. Also, when I record stuff from TV, I use VHS. It's more convenient and reliable for me and I will be able to store the tape for a long time and still be able to play it as long as I have a working VCR. And replacing a VCR is easier than re-recording lots of tapes/discs.

[QlShdR]

If you're not willing to take some small chances to save hundreds of euros, well that's your choice. But don't say there isn't a viable solution to your small income, because there is.

But the price is still too high, that's what you don't understand...If I'd earn ~800-1000 EUR average, like in many country in the Eruopean Union, then it wouldn't matter.

[Freedom Kira]

I think that was the point of buying online, was it not? I fully understand, hence my last sentence. Save as much money as you can because of low income and high prices. At least look at the alternative - many things electronic can be found online for less than in stores, and even less if they're used items.

But hey, if you have a cheap, readily available source of BD-DL discs, go for it. Be warned, though, that optical discs can become unreadable over time, depending on how they were manufactured.

[QlShdR]

I think that was the point of buying online, was it not? I fully understand, hence my last sentence. Save as much money as you can because of low income and high prices. At least look at the alternative - many things electronic can be found online for less than in stores, and even less if they're used items.

But hey, if you have a cheap, readily available source of BD-DL discs, go for it. Be warned, though, that optical discs can become unreadable over time, depending on how they were manufactured.

Nothing else can be done. For now.
(I bought several items via net, but it was all inland deliveries. Except one, but that stuff came from the neighbourhood. )

That's why you should rewrite your discs in ~5 years period (but I have discs 12-13 years old -mostly Philips and TDK CDs- working just fine, though they're not BDs).

Perhaps JVC™ (made in Japan) will suffice.  

[tomoya-kun]

Recently started using BD disks, they are actually suprisingly good.  Hold alot of data!

[Lupin]

I only backup documents. The backups are in encrypted archives (with recovery records) and saved on some gmail account.

As for other files, I simply store them some drives and disconnect them when not in use. I'm more worried about data corruption than drive failure.

I am planning to buy a BD Writer when it becomes available in my country. I won't be using BD for backup though. Disc design makes it non-ideal for backups

[QlShdR]

Recently started using BD disks, they are actually suprisingly good.  Hold alot of data!

Well, time will tell. But I'll put my faith into them.

[NaRu]

Recently started using BD disks, they are actually suprisingly good.  Hold alot of data!

Well, time will tell. But I'll put my faith into them.

I did the whole burning onto disk thing ages ago. I found myself never go back to them again. I never re-watch an anime because I was too lazy to go through my DVD book to watch them. Then again this was when I only had one computer and can only watch downloaded anime on my PC and not my TV.

[Freedom Kira]

IMO optical media are best for sharing, not for backing up data. If someone wants a copy of something you've downloaded, just burn a DVD and fork it over. $0.25 to share up to 4.38GB of data is pretty cool.

[per]

IMO optical media are best for sharing, not for backing up data. If someone wants a copy of something you've downloaded, just burn a DVD and fork it over. $0.25 to share up to 4.38GB of data is pretty cool.

Then again, simply copying the data over the network, or telling them where to download it is usually way faster, unless they live next door, and if so you could have a 1Gbps local network.. :-)

Personally I only backup to other harddrives, and only backup things that can not easily be downloaded again.

The drives I backup to are located in a different physical locations, though. One alternative if you do not feel like setting up your own servers around the world is to use a service like jungledisk.

The "harddrives will not last!" argument is not really relevant since you usually replace them every few years, so "live" backups get copied to new drives regularly.

I only have ~10Tb of media, but having "real" backups of even that amount is a pain.

One of the things I do keep a backup of is the uTorrent state of my torrent-server, by the way.

[TorturdChaos]

I don't have much for a backup at home.  I have serveral 1TB WD Black drives that I store everything on on my computer and have a bit of backup done for stuff I really don't want to loose - like my music is mirrored over to another drive just in case, and its on my laptop.  I have a folder over useful software, some of which I would have trouble finding again so I keep it on several different hdd's in case one fails.  But all my anime, games, movies and TV shows I only keep one copy of due to space restrictions.

I'm working on finishing my media server which I think will get some cheaper HDD's to use as backup and run the WD Blacks as the main drives in it.

At work we have everything on a networked sever running FreeBSD that then gets copied to a spare HDD in my computer than backed up with Carbonite.  I wish I could just load carbonite on the FreeBSD sever but it only runs on Windows, and I didn't know this until after the boss had paid the subsucription service.  Also can't backup off a network drive....  (I really don't like Carbonite and wish we used something like CrashPlan, which you can install on ANY OS and even do backup's between machines for free.  If we had that I would just have everything backup between our 3 stores.)