Im thinking about buying one, but im not sure how reliable they are? Does anyone here have one and what are your experiences with it. The storage capacity is mindboggling at 25Gb for single layer and 50Gb for dual layer. This is a great option for backing up the really big games these days. Do you think this will be widely accepted format for storage by most people? Like how DVDR replaced CDR storage.

It will never be a widely accepted format.

USB flash drives are dirt cheap and so are large capacity external hard drives. Optical disks simply don't make sense anymore for large volume backups.

BlueRay is probably best for HD films and such, but I'd use USB storage drives in synchronisation with local computer drives as a safe back up. It's expensive (based on volume alone), but relatively safe.

well first off to fill 25-50gb of disk space you have to first HAVE 25-50gb worth of files that you don't mind not having instant access to / are OK with no being able to modify the file structure (like adding and subtracting files on the fly).

when you think about it the only thing BD is good for is creating a commercial product that you intend to sell, but most commercial BD players will not play disks with copy protection, and anything for personal/private use is better off saved on a hard drive or flash drive.

I think BD is good for massive archival house cleaning, but not much else ... like maybe a digital artist / digital photographer / digital musician would have a need for them in having a one stop backup location for all the editing materials that went into a product.

well, I guess the more obvious reason would be the "I wanna burn my torrents to disk" avenue. it would have happened if not for the onset of digital distribution ... now we are likely to never see a return to physical media PC games.

Interesting discussion. I guess digital distribution has changed everything and Blueray may not be widely accepted as DVDR.

Original question about how reliable they are is still valid though. I could see there use - as in, yes I do have a 1 TB external drive which is point, at this, still, enough ... but I do work with audio / film (and especially) photography (shooting in raw mode) which does generate a lot of 'raw data'. Static stuff like that, that absolutely doesn't require quick access once past the editing stage - but that I may need to / may want to look at again at some undetermined point in the future. I do still backup on DVDs; given the higher capacity of blueray disks it'd save a lot of space; unless of course they degrade much worse or are significantly more prone to failure.

For me, backing up on DVDR and CDR is a very hard habit to break. When its on disc, i feel completely safe from hardware failure. I cringe at the thought of having a 2Tb external filled with archived games failing in 5 or 10 years and no way to recover. At least on disc, i can buy another drive and the data is stored safely forever. I still prefer disc for archiving my games, but im not sure if Bluray is reliable enough yet. I may wait for the next gen of burners.

In this age, moving parts are out of fashion. Mechanical devices are more prone to failures due to a misalignment of their parts, and are more sensitive to breakage and sudden movement. Not to mention they're generally much slower than purely electronic devices, since mechanical movement can never match the speed of electricity or light in a closed circuit. Optical media are particularly vulnerable to dirt and dust that gradually accumulates inside the device and covers the lens. And the discs themselves are easily scratched and smudged. Plus, they aren't really practical in terms of physical storage in the room. Considering they need a case to keep them safe, they tend to take up a lot of space on the desk.

I, too, believe the future of data storage is in flash memory and especially solid-state drives. Already you can store tens of gigabytes on a device the size of your thumb. So why bother with those unwieldy discs?

It's not forever. CDs and DVDs have a life expectancy of approximately 10 years because they start to oxidize with time. Discs with a higher quality sealing at the edges may resist longer than that but it's a gamble. I don't know what is the situation with Blue-Ray but I suspect it's not different.

Well, for one thing, solid-state drives are still quite expensive, and don't come in the large sizes that normal HDDs do. On the other hand, I'm sure that writeable BluRay discs also cost a pretty penny, so the question is which is actually cheaper per GB. Of course an SDD also has the great benefit of having read/write access all the time.

I heard that quite often. But my oldest CDs are over 20 years old, and last time I checked them (out of curiosity) they did still work.

Yeah, that's the main reason why I'm also considering to get a BR burner. Audio and especially video editing generate awful amounts of raw data which I usually won't need again (at least not that often) and I'd rather use my HDDs to store stuff that I need easy access to. Problem is though that I don't know what "life expectancy" BRs have. I've heard of CDs and DVDs becoming useless after a couple of years (my earliest discs that I've burned more than ten years ago still seem to work, however, same is true for our earliest audio CDs that my parents bought like twenty years ago). Don't know about BRs yet.

There are a lot of variables with optical media, like the disc brand (hint: Maxell, Sony, Verbatim are most reliable), and also things like disc burning speed (i.e. lower is better).

I'm not sure flash memory is reliable/stable for long-term storage/backup. A lot of what I read seems to suggest otherwise. But obviously optical media isn't fail-safe either, especially with the wrong variables.

I guess then redundancy is a good idea for backing up files and data, and so it makes sense choosing the cheapest option possible for multiple backups, and right now optical media is cheapest by far.

For the record, I've never had any music or movie disc die on me, ever. I did once burn data onto a PRINCO brand DVD, which failed after a few days. I suspect discs burned at home are more likely to fail than music CD or DVD movie you buy in the store, but again brand of the blank discs is a factor.

To my understanding the main benefit of SSDs is their extremely high access speed, the downside is the price/volume ratio. So while they are safer than classic HDDs you wouldn't want to waste your SSDs for archival purposes unless you've got a lot of money AND extremely important data, right?