Over the last few days Jacqui and I have been having a massive cleanup. After deciding we liked the house we are in and didn’t want to move but needed more room, we agreed the place to start was to get rid of things we didn’t need or use that were taking up valuable internal real estate.
In the process, as well as the odd old office chairs and empty cardboard boxes etc., we discovered – or re-discovered – all sorts of stuff; 5 sets of wireless earbuds, 4 different podcasting mics, countless USB, networking and video cables, half a dozen old USB drives, a couple of video splitters, USB hubs and network switches, a cracked iPad, 3 dead phones… you get the idea.
But as well as packets of A4 photo paper, it turned out we also had spindles and spindles of blank DVD and Blu-ray discs.
Now I cannot remember the last time I burned a video I had shot and edited to a DVD or Blu-ray disc, but I also didn’t want to throw these out like I did with a few MiniDV tapes a few years back.
I also wondered if anyone actually did still use DVDs / Blu-Ray media these days. A quick search found an article by Verbatim for “World Backup Day”. Yes, it actually exists apparently, and was on March 31st this year when people were urged to backup their 2022 data for safekeeping.
A very good idea I thought, and a subject I had touched on earlier re: smartphone data.
Anyway, it turns out that Verbatim suggests all data should have 3 backups current, not necessarily all on the same media, and one of them kept off site. And this is where DVDs and Blu-ray discs come into the picture as they are a relatively cheap form of backup media. For example, a 100GB BDXL MDISC can store – obviously – 100GB, Verbatim claim a shelf life of the recorded disc up to 1000 years and these can be bought in 5 packs for about $100.
If you don’t need that much space, then 25GB Blu-ray discs can cost as little as $2.50 each.
And they take up bugger all space when stored for archiving. By way of example, when the ABC back in around 2005 announced that they would be showing every episode of the original Dr Who prior to the new series with Christopher Eccleston, I went out and bought a DVD player / recorder and recorded every one of those episodes for posterity. These have sat in a Roladex-like sealed container since then and take up maybe 10 centimetres of shelf space. 694 episodes I believe.
So, to answer my original query, I’ll be using this trove of DVDs and Blu-rays to create my backups for the foreseeable future, knowing they are easily accessible if the unthinkable should happen.
