With Blue-Ray gaining in popularity, and prices dropping, is it going
to replace DVDs as the preferred high capacity storage media?
Preferred? Of course, all the newest high capacity stuff is
"preferred".
Replace, no not anytime soon as the drives and media is too
expensive ATM. The industry sells the cheap stuff in
volume. "Soon" could mean anything in the computer industry
though, if someone started pumping out Blue-Ray drives at
dirt cheap prices it would help a lot, but HD-DVD seems far
more likely to win the war on the PC because these days
there aren't that many people looking to spend 1/3rd their
entire PC budget on a Blue-Ray drive, not that many people
looking to spend over $600 at all anymore with exception of
some critical employee productivity roles.
I
havent seen new PCs with blue-ray drives installed yet.
I have 4 options at this point: stick with DVD's, buy external HDD, or
tape storage(DDS/DAT). DDS-3 is 12gb & DDS-4 is 20gb, low tape price
per gb and capacity good enough to back up entire HDD to 10
tapes($30).
I am planning to store the back-ups off-site, in a safe deposit box at
the bank, or my uncle's garage; thus, whatever I choose it cant take
up too much space.
Blue-Ray is just a form of storage, I feel you fixate too
much on it. How about looking at things the other way
around, what the real need is, then what alternatives there
are to meet the need?
If this backup is critical enough to store off-site, I would
not rely on only optical discs. Practically anything but a
whole NAS/Server PC based system will be small enough that
storage isn't a problem.
Do you really "need" whole HDD backed up? I mean more than
once, often with large data stores an incremental backup
plan is instituted so you're not needing so much
media/drives/etc to maintain a regular backup interval, but
with optical discs I feel an incremental backup is more of a
risk since the original data set discs are more crucial in
this case.
I didn't really point to a solution but some variables
remain like total budget, convenience, backup and
restoration speed, backup (time) interval, etc. An external
hard drive is the easiest solution. Tape might be the
longest lasting, providing you have good temp and moisture
controlled storage for it... and it wouldn't hurt to store a
backup tape drive the same way if you really need it long
term as drive rollers, dust buildup, other factors can make
the original drive unreliable after a few years..
