Best Practices For Long Term Storage Of Optical Media (For Archival, Backup)

In today's optical media and storage deep dive, I take a look at two sets of guidelines for the safe long-term storage of optical media - these days primarily Blu-Rays and M-Discs but also DVDs and CDs.

Sources:

1: Council on Library and Information Resources (CILR):

2: Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs, ande Blu-rays (Canadian Conservation Institute Notes 19/1):

** Timestamps **

00:00 - Intro
01:21 - Introduction to CLIR standards
04:36 - Optical media storage standards
15:23 - Canadian / CCI recommendations

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By: Daniel Rosehill

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[butmunchass]

This might sound like a nitpick but "archival" and "backup" actually refer to different things in the data storage space. "Backup" is something like you copying a system image of your main storage daily driver (either HDD or SDD) to an external HDD every two weeks with all OS and programs also copied over in the system image. "Archival" isn't normally done more often than every 6 months and refers to data that you don't typically need on a daily basis. Optical is almost never used for "backup" but can be a good choice for "archival" storage. I don't currently rely on optical for my backup nor archival needs currently but what I use blu ray discs for is to author movies from my computer to a playable blu ray disc and then that can be used for playback in a real blu ray player attached to a large TV because watching movies on large screen TV is usually a better experience. My relatives especially like the home movies that they can watch on large big screen TV rather than have to crowd around a small computer screen.

[butmunchass]

If you really want a complete knowledge of consumer optical archival considerations you might check into whether the 25 GB discs are more reliable than the 50, 100, and 128 GB versions. If you read the amazon reviews some people think that the 25 GB discs are more reliable. A lot of people have problems at least with writing to anything above 25 GB and they are probably using faulty media but would be interesting if there's a difference in durability in the different capacity discs for long storage.

[OShackHennessy]

There’s a video of a guy soaking M-disks in water for a number of days and they worked fine.

I enjoy these videos most people don’t find optical media very sexy but I have chosen to create an optical archive as I feel it’s the best consumer grade solution to long term storage. I keep regular backups on naked HDD’s but have made the mistake of trying to lump my archival data in with that. I need to separate everything to make life easier.