I’m backing up some data and fighting with some BD-R TL disks, looking for suggestions on decent disks in triple layer or quad layer.
Currently fighting with Verbatim Made in Japan white inkjet printable part number 98897 in a brand new Pioneer drive. The 25GB single layer disks are working fine so I’ve started to zip into chunks small enough to fit the 25gb disks. I was trying to burn 4 of these chunks onto a single 100gb, and chunk 3 always comes back as bad, must be in a layer split. The source chunk unzips fine, just the burned chunk fails!
If you have suggestion, please let me know. I have a lot of things I want to burn, and growing daily.
As an aside, I’ve forgotten how slow optical disks are. Wish I could automate this. About 22 minutes to burn, and what seems like longer to copy the files back to a drive to unzip (need to test them before putting them away). Wishing winrar was free, would be nice to have some repair blocks available.
That is quite old school to be backing up data on Blu-ray’s. Why not use the cloud and use the encryption at rest? I use linode to do just that. So what if my data is on linode servers. If anyone tries to poke around it is a bunch of random characters on folders and files anyway.
I would look into https://www.mdisc.com
We’ve been using them as cold backup at work (on side of tapes I think) and our IT guys seem to be happy with it.
You just need compatible BR burner but those are dirt cheap.
Doesn’t look like prices have come down much in the last 10 years. Kind of shy on the 100GB disks, I’ve wasted about $40 in the past few days on bad burns from that Verbatim above.
We have 50GB disks (no idea why I’m not IT) and from what they tell me never had a write issue (using a burner that is specified by Mdisc as compatible/good choice).
I plan to use them for my home offline backups but not enough time to try it for the next few times
This is the third and newest burner that I’ve had that supports up to quad layer disks, and never burned any of these 100gb disks successfully. I have a feeling the entire pack of 10 was bad. Went through 10 of the single layer BD disks and 2 double layer DVD without issue today, newest burner is working great.
Looking at Mdisc compatibility (I realise they are different from normal BRs you are trying to burn) it seems that very few burners support 100GB variant discs. Maybe the same is the case for normal discs?
I hadn’t noticed that… Maybe the triple layer disks just don’t work and can’t achieve the M-Disc logo due to poor performance. M-Disc is supposed to mean “guaranteed” long life and maybe the triple layer stuff can’t meet that.
Seems the 128gb never made it to proper adoption for the long life version, and it 2022 Verbatim changed their coatings. The disks I’ve been using are probably 10 years old now, we haven’t used them much. The 25gb were purchased to record video from a rack mounted BR/DVD recorder in our studio. They are also Verbatim. Back then, Verbatim was about the only supplier that had long life disks, and had a track record too.
I’ll have to look at some of the 50 year dye based disks, I won’t care in 50 years because I’ll either be over 100, or dead and nothing I am currently storing is worth anything to anyone but me. The data may even be obsolete in the next few years.
I’m still using DVD-RW and DVD+R, DVD-RAM I actually have a long history with, a little over 20 years now and the Panasonic disks I used back then are still reading data without more errors than it can correct. Still a favorite but the data capacity is generally too small for DVD these days.
I’ll have to fork out for some M-Disc and see how they work, my burner is “certified” for these disks. I’ll wait until this next batch of materials is done and see if it fits the 50gb disks, the last one was just barely bigger than a 25gb disk and I couldn’t find enough stuff to through away to fit, even ZIP it didn’t reduce far enough to fit. Put that on DVD+R DL disks because I had them on hand.
