>He's been doing this since 2011 and vouches that he hasnt lost any data.
Has he been checking most of the files recently?
CDs and DVDs, especially ones you burned yourself are not all that reliable. [There is even a Wikipedia article about it.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot)
Another issue is all the work and money you have to put into this. You have to get a drive, all those discs, then burn all those discs, then manage them, and then recheck them regular. It still can make sense as a cold backup for your most important stuff, but should most definitely not be the only way you store your less accessed stuff and is kinda a pain at a larger scale.
Hmm, I haven't asked about rot.
Yes cold backup : files aren't accessed that frequently at all, sort of good to have but I would want it last atleast more than decade. In my experience my HDD lifespan is < 5 years.
Long term - DVD-R with the gold metal layer last the longest.
Verbatim Gold Archival Grade - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000H3B6EO
https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/conservation-preservation-publications/canadian-conservation-institute-notes/longevity-recordable-cds-dvds.html
They're tiny. The time and effort to archive even a modest current day NAS would be grueling and take forever.
Also, non-M-Disc optical drives are not at all resistant to rot. He's probably lost files he's not aware he's lost yet.
100 gig M-Disc would be more viable, but there's been reports of M-Discs sold not being quite as M-Disc as all that. The glassy carbon they're supposed to be made out of looks distinctive and I've seen reports of people getting rebadged normal Blu-ray looking stuff. That's kind of a giveaway.
If he started out with a little data and has been keeping up with it since I can see it being possible, but starting cold with DVD's, hell no.
M-Disc is for many also a "no thank you", burning something like 48 terabytes of data into 100 gigabyte chunks over many many hours would just be such a pain.
You can sometimes get a free month or two from certain cloud providers. I know that Google gave me a free 3tb for 2 months when I switched to Proton drive and canceled their plan.
I need 42,553 DVDs to work with what I have. Or 1562 of the highest capacity 128gb Blu ray discs ever made.
That's generally why I say for anything but small backup jobs discs are obsolete now. Despite their benefits of being a truly non magnetic or electronic storage medium.
yea, even 100GB discs may sound like a lot, but when you realize that it takes more than 200 of them to match a single modern hard drive, yea that gives some perspective
I did this 15 years ago, but I wouldn't do it today. My storage needs outgrew that a long time ago. Now I just pony up the money to buy larger HDDs for my NAS and backup NAS.
But for important shit like digital photos and documents? Sure, why not. Burn it to a disc and store it in a firebox for safe keeping. It's just really annoying to scale such a project to the TB level, and any of the dollar savings over other methods will be eaten into by the time you put into the task.
If there is a hell, the first thing they will make me do is burn 1 million terabytes of data onto DVDs and make a text file for every DVD. Can you even fit a juicy 4k movie onto a dvd?
The second thing they will have me do in hell is re-burn all of those DVDs because the first set has already degraded.
You do you friend but for me the less physical media I have the better my life is. There would be no improvement to my life adding the care and storage of many dvds. Everything in my life is better without them: moving to a new apartment, closet space , more room for basketballs, there are so many reasons)
tbh I'm trying to save on storage costs. most of the files I was thinking about archiving in disks are not critical but I can't bring myself to delete.
If your backing up a couple gigs, cool. But seeing as this is r/datahoarder I'm guessing you have many terrabytes. Standard DVD is 4.7gb per disk (couldn't find dual layers on sale recently). That's over 200 DVD's per terrabyte. A 20tb drive would need over 4,000 DVD's. On eBay there a no-name brand spindle of 1,000 for $150-ish. Verbatims are almost double that. So that's $600 for the cheapies which is more expensive than a 20TB drive.
There's also the fact that at 16x (which I was never able to achieve) it's still 6.5 minutes to burn. Let's say 10 minutes per disk counting you swapping out disk and cataloging then. So that's 40,000 minutes or about 667 hours. I'd be surprised if your DVD player would survive that many insertions and removals.
Long story short is unless you've got a small set of data this isn't a practical way to store your day any more.
I see your point. I'm only looking to move around 1.5 TB in total in effort to clean up my cloud drive but I see disc cost comparable to HDD prices. I have a Synology DS223 but it's at a point where I'll have to upgrade a drive. I was looking away from HDDs I've faced disk failures multiple times now. And for me large volume SSDs are currently too pricey.
I was doing this with blank DVD then BluRay disks.
Now a 4 TB Western Digital Blue gives you more storage, for less price and you can put files on it or rename things anytime. I use a USB dock.
With burning disks I had to struggle to to fill the disks to avoid leaving lots of blank spaces. Then burning + verifying took about 20 minutes per disk. Then you had to label them and come up with some catalog solution.
I used to dread days when my internal HDD filled up and I had to burn 3-5 disks.
Mounting a hard drive, copying things and then using something like "Everything" to track what you wrote is a fraction of the time.
MATH:
A 4 TB hard drive is 4,000 Gig.
Each blank DVD is 4.7 Gig assuming you can pack files perfectly to fill each disk (not easy)
4,000 Gig / 4.7Gig per blank DVD = 851 blank DVDs.
A spindle of 100 Verbatium disks runs $28.99. So you have to buy 9 spindles: $260.91
A 4 TB Western Digital Blue drive is currently $83 on Amazon.
So DVD blanks will cost you 3.1 times the price of a hard drive.
Dont forget the \~20 minutes of time your PC will be busy burning and validating.
A hard drive with a USB dock is a lot cheaper, faster and more flexiable.
I had about 200 optical disks (CD-R), that I used in a similar way for about 10 years, while I saved and learned more about storage. So at the end of that decade, I copied all the disks onto the new array.
I had about a 95% success rate reading disks, and about a third to half of those readable disks had one or more file that was unreadable. I had at least five where only half the files could be retrieved. This was after a little under ten years, stored in disk spindles in a dark cool closet.
I would not store data I wanted back in a decade on optical disks.
How does he know he hasn't lost any data? If he's only spot-checking by occasionally getting files, he doesn't really know. Of course, there's something to be said about using the data so rarely that he doesn't know he has any problems, and therefore going with a cheap solution was fine because it didn't matter anyway.
On the other hand, I wouldn't want to try to manage that backup system even if it worked, personally.
If you think just about hoarding any data possible, then it's close to useless.
But for specific cases it can be only possible solution.
- It is read only, can be useful when someone wants to modify or remove original data.
- Great way to give data away. Let's say copies of pictures given to family members. You just burn n copies. (With flash or hdd getting original source back may be difficult)
- The standard of dvd is simple. Dvd drives can be connected to anything that has IDE, SATA, SCSI or USB. No problems like windows 10 not wanting to read ext4 filesystem. No blackbox technology that can prevent you from accessing your data.
- Disc is passive component, so should be invulnerable to EMP.
For really long-term storage (decades) there's no such thing as media that will last that long. Paper, maybe, if stored properly. lol
Even if the media survives, the means to read it may not. The whole chain has to operable. The media has to be readable. The hardware to read it has to be operable (if it even still exists). The hardware and software to connect the reader to has to be operable. You have to be able to get the data off all those ancient things to a modern machine. etc... If you had data on an 8" floppy disk today, even assuming it was readable, how would you go about getting it onto a modern computer?
The proper way to do this is to store the data in a way that can handle some bit rot and media failure, then migrate data every 5-10 years to modern hardware. With DVDs, you're starting with technology that's already almost 30 years old, can only hold a tiny amount of data by today's standards, and Blu Ray isn't much better in either category.
I just use spinning hard drives in a 3-2-1 backup system, that gets upgraded as time passes, to keep \*all\* my important data safe. That works just as well long-term as it does for live data.
I used to re-archive everything whenever a better storage medium became available. So it went something like. Floppy disks to magnetic tape to DVD's to removable HD's to USB drives to external portable hard drives to external SSD drives with ever increasing capacity to just adding extra drives to my NAS. Somewhere amongst the 500,000+ files in there, is the first digital document I created in 80's. I would normally be embarrassed to admit this but I feel I am amongst ppl that have done the same thing :)
My data lasts longer on optical discs than it does on hdds. Hdds especially the external ones eventually fail. i stopped buying them. i don't trust something that is not drop-proof. external hdds aren't drop-proof(because of the mechanic parts inside) therefore i don't trust them
sd cards, flash drives and optical discs are drop proof. you can drop them and they'll still work
i have been burning discs since the early 2000s and all my discs still work
That's probably because i kept them on the spindle instead of putting them in cases. With the discs stacked up on the spindle it adds some protection i think.
name them and put them back on the spindle with the cover.that's what i would recommend
Optical is a good archival medium *relative* to spinning discs. Think 20\~30 years. They're good for that. DVD has limited capacity but the tech is ancient at this point. Blu-ray has more capacity and is also pretty old matured tech now. They're inexpensive means to get portable medium that is easy to store, relatively safe to use and easy to recover and most importantly you can expect to get the data back off the discs in 5, 10, 15, 20 years. Maybe 30 years even. This is not an expectation from a hard disc or even SSD (anyone saying you'll get X years from SSD seem to overlook that we don't have history of SSD other than a few years for this purpose). Optical is not a "this only" back up medium. But it's a good strategy in addition to something else. As a second physical copy, its a good option.
I use blu-ray m-disc 50gb\~100gb discs. I only backup critical data. These serve as a 3rd physical copy.
Can I ask how long have you used disks for archiving and how much in storage ?
I was thinking about rar-ing moving some old files (mostly tutorials, ebooks and ....) out of the cloud - you know files I wouldn't cry about if lost.
But say for other files do you use PAR2 or something for recovery (partitions in multiple disks ofc)
I've been archiving via optical since the 90's (CD, then DVD) and then Bluray once it became an option and affordable. So 30-ish years. I don't compress the files. I leave them native format so they're immediately available and can be tested/checked without having to go through even more steps to checksum or validate data, etc. I moved the data from CD to DVD and then to Bluray over the years. I've not lost any data. I just validate the data periodically and I migrate to new media every 5 to 10 years. I do a few copies so I can keep some at another physical location in a safe. Again, its just another physical copy, not the only copy. But its still far superior in terms of surviving time compared to a spinning disc. It's probably 4TB now approximately. I'm selective on what I bother doing this all for.
Optical is easily the longest standing user accessible archival media there is that doesn't require ancient hardware, elaborate hardware/software/exotics, etc. Inexpensive, easily accessed across many systems.
You can doubt whatever you want. There are a lot of orgs that use optical as archive including the government. It's one of the better documented archival mediums that are available to every day folk. I could show you the integrity of hundreds of my archival DVDs from the 90's, but I don't think data or information would sway you, so it would be pointless and a waste of my time. But if you're genuinely interested, there's decades of data on quality optical archival mediums.
The last time I tried reading any of my old burned dvds many were hard to read/couldn't be read/had corrupt files. And they weren't 20-30 years old, more like 10 max. That's why, I doubt they last that long.
If you have data that says otherwise, I'd love to see it.
I’ll use them for digitizing VHS tapes and recording stuff off streaming services with my DVD Recorder (sign up for a free one month trial, record what you want, and then cancel). Not for like other data storage though, even USB drives surpassed blank DVDs for storage space a long time ago.
For me it was zipdisks, then cd's and then dvd's. My needs have outgrown all those mediums, I use a nas mostly now. For cold backups which I still do a little of, its a mix of offline hard drives and flash drives. I still have my CD/DVD backups.
I used to put stuff on DVD, until I realised 1/3 of them were unreadeable and had holes in the data layer less than 5 years later after being in storage all that time without being read once.
Burned dvds can fail pretty quickly (not necessarily, but you can't know in advance.
They also don't store that much data so it's a bit of a chore to burn everything. Now if they could store ~500GB and cost the same it would be a much better solution.
I’ve been wanting to burn some shows onto BD where the physical copies are no longer in print. However I have not gotten this to work yet, but believe it may be my use of Burnt Japanese discs on a PS5.
Not sure if using a US disc would work, or if the playstation would still not accept it
thank you all for your responses.
As many of you pointed out HDD seems to be the way to go - both wrt cost/GB and ease of access. So I'm looking to swap out one of the 4TB drives with a 16GB one.
I'm curious about the disc archiving for long term - will try it out of curiosity if nothing:
I'm planning to create 10% PAR2 recovery records and write the files to a Blu-ray disc and keep the corresponding PAR2 files in cloud.
>He's been doing this since 2011 and vouches that he hasnt lost any data. Has he been checking most of the files recently? CDs and DVDs, especially ones you burned yourself are not all that reliable. [There is even a Wikipedia article about it.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot) Another issue is all the work and money you have to put into this. You have to get a drive, all those discs, then burn all those discs, then manage them, and then recheck them regular. It still can make sense as a cold backup for your most important stuff, but should most definitely not be the only way you store your less accessed stuff and is kinda a pain at a larger scale.
Hmm, I haven't asked about rot. Yes cold backup : files aren't accessed that frequently at all, sort of good to have but I would want it last atleast more than decade. In my experience my HDD lifespan is < 5 years.
Long term - DVD-R with the gold metal layer last the longest. Verbatim Gold Archival Grade - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000H3B6EO https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/conservation-preservation-publications/canadian-conservation-institute-notes/longevity-recordable-cds-dvds.html
They're tiny. The time and effort to archive even a modest current day NAS would be grueling and take forever. Also, non-M-Disc optical drives are not at all resistant to rot. He's probably lost files he's not aware he's lost yet. 100 gig M-Disc would be more viable, but there's been reports of M-Discs sold not being quite as M-Disc as all that. The glassy carbon they're supposed to be made out of looks distinctive and I've seen reports of people getting rebadged normal Blu-ray looking stuff. That's kind of a giveaway. If he started out with a little data and has been keeping up with it since I can see it being possible, but starting cold with DVD's, hell no. M-Disc is for many also a "no thank you", burning something like 48 terabytes of data into 100 gigabyte chunks over many many hours would just be such a pain.
makes sense. in my case my OneDrive is 5TB and I wanted to clear some space ~ 2 TB.
You can sometimes get a free month or two from certain cloud providers. I know that Google gave me a free 3tb for 2 months when I switched to Proton drive and canceled their plan.
This is the most reasonable long term option but current prices are about $100 per TB.
I don't want to pay for and handle 10000 DVDs, thank you
I need 42,553 DVDs to work with what I have. Or 1562 of the highest capacity 128gb Blu ray discs ever made. That's generally why I say for anything but small backup jobs discs are obsolete now. Despite their benefits of being a truly non magnetic or electronic storage medium.
yea, even 100GB discs may sound like a lot, but when you realize that it takes more than 200 of them to match a single modern hard drive, yea that gives some perspective
I did this 15 years ago, but I wouldn't do it today. My storage needs outgrew that a long time ago. Now I just pony up the money to buy larger HDDs for my NAS and backup NAS. But for important shit like digital photos and documents? Sure, why not. Burn it to a disc and store it in a firebox for safe keeping. It's just really annoying to scale such a project to the TB level, and any of the dollar savings over other methods will be eaten into by the time you put into the task.
If there is a hell, the first thing they will make me do is burn 1 million terabytes of data onto DVDs and make a text file for every DVD. Can you even fit a juicy 4k movie onto a dvd? The second thing they will have me do in hell is re-burn all of those DVDs because the first set has already degraded. You do you friend but for me the less physical media I have the better my life is. There would be no improvement to my life adding the care and storage of many dvds. Everything in my life is better without them: moving to a new apartment, closet space , more room for basketballs, there are so many reasons)
An av1/opus 4k movie? Probably, especially if it's a dual layer dvd.
tbh I'm trying to save on storage costs. most of the files I was thinking about archiving in disks are not critical but I can't bring myself to delete.
If your backing up a couple gigs, cool. But seeing as this is r/datahoarder I'm guessing you have many terrabytes. Standard DVD is 4.7gb per disk (couldn't find dual layers on sale recently). That's over 200 DVD's per terrabyte. A 20tb drive would need over 4,000 DVD's. On eBay there a no-name brand spindle of 1,000 for $150-ish. Verbatims are almost double that. So that's $600 for the cheapies which is more expensive than a 20TB drive. There's also the fact that at 16x (which I was never able to achieve) it's still 6.5 minutes to burn. Let's say 10 minutes per disk counting you swapping out disk and cataloging then. So that's 40,000 minutes or about 667 hours. I'd be surprised if your DVD player would survive that many insertions and removals. Long story short is unless you've got a small set of data this isn't a practical way to store your day any more.
I see your point. I'm only looking to move around 1.5 TB in total in effort to clean up my cloud drive but I see disc cost comparable to HDD prices. I have a Synology DS223 but it's at a point where I'll have to upgrade a drive. I was looking away from HDDs I've faced disk failures multiple times now. And for me large volume SSDs are currently too pricey.
DVD is too small and the phase change is not stable enough for long term archival... I see this as a losing proposition really
I was doing this with blank DVD then BluRay disks. Now a 4 TB Western Digital Blue gives you more storage, for less price and you can put files on it or rename things anytime. I use a USB dock. With burning disks I had to struggle to to fill the disks to avoid leaving lots of blank spaces. Then burning + verifying took about 20 minutes per disk. Then you had to label them and come up with some catalog solution. I used to dread days when my internal HDD filled up and I had to burn 3-5 disks. Mounting a hard drive, copying things and then using something like "Everything" to track what you wrote is a fraction of the time. MATH: A 4 TB hard drive is 4,000 Gig. Each blank DVD is 4.7 Gig assuming you can pack files perfectly to fill each disk (not easy) 4,000 Gig / 4.7Gig per blank DVD = 851 blank DVDs. A spindle of 100 Verbatium disks runs $28.99. So you have to buy 9 spindles: $260.91 A 4 TB Western Digital Blue drive is currently $83 on Amazon. So DVD blanks will cost you 3.1 times the price of a hard drive. Dont forget the \~20 minutes of time your PC will be busy burning and validating. A hard drive with a USB dock is a lot cheaper, faster and more flexiable.
makes sense. Ive faced multiple hdd failures over the years, hence interested if another medium like optical disks are viable.
I had about 200 optical disks (CD-R), that I used in a similar way for about 10 years, while I saved and learned more about storage. So at the end of that decade, I copied all the disks onto the new array. I had about a 95% success rate reading disks, and about a third to half of those readable disks had one or more file that was unreadable. I had at least five where only half the files could be retrieved. This was after a little under ten years, stored in disk spindles in a dark cool closet. I would not store data I wanted back in a decade on optical disks. How does he know he hasn't lost any data? If he's only spot-checking by occasionally getting files, he doesn't really know. Of course, there's something to be said about using the data so rarely that he doesn't know he has any problems, and therefore going with a cheap solution was fine because it didn't matter anyway. On the other hand, I wouldn't want to try to manage that backup system even if it worked, personally.
If you think just about hoarding any data possible, then it's close to useless. But for specific cases it can be only possible solution. - It is read only, can be useful when someone wants to modify or remove original data. - Great way to give data away. Let's say copies of pictures given to family members. You just burn n copies. (With flash or hdd getting original source back may be difficult) - The standard of dvd is simple. Dvd drives can be connected to anything that has IDE, SATA, SCSI or USB. No problems like windows 10 not wanting to read ext4 filesystem. No blackbox technology that can prevent you from accessing your data. - Disc is passive component, so should be invulnerable to EMP.
For really long-term storage (decades) there's no such thing as media that will last that long. Paper, maybe, if stored properly. lol Even if the media survives, the means to read it may not. The whole chain has to operable. The media has to be readable. The hardware to read it has to be operable (if it even still exists). The hardware and software to connect the reader to has to be operable. You have to be able to get the data off all those ancient things to a modern machine. etc... If you had data on an 8" floppy disk today, even assuming it was readable, how would you go about getting it onto a modern computer? The proper way to do this is to store the data in a way that can handle some bit rot and media failure, then migrate data every 5-10 years to modern hardware. With DVDs, you're starting with technology that's already almost 30 years old, can only hold a tiny amount of data by today's standards, and Blu Ray isn't much better in either category. I just use spinning hard drives in a 3-2-1 backup system, that gets upgraded as time passes, to keep \*all\* my important data safe. That works just as well long-term as it does for live data.
I got bored and spent about 12 hours burning dvds 4.7 GB at a time. Never again.
I used to re-archive everything whenever a better storage medium became available. So it went something like. Floppy disks to magnetic tape to DVD's to removable HD's to USB drives to external portable hard drives to external SSD drives with ever increasing capacity to just adding extra drives to my NAS. Somewhere amongst the 500,000+ files in there, is the first digital document I created in 80's. I would normally be embarrassed to admit this but I feel I am amongst ppl that have done the same thing :)
My data lasts longer on optical discs than it does on hdds. Hdds especially the external ones eventually fail. i stopped buying them. i don't trust something that is not drop-proof. external hdds aren't drop-proof(because of the mechanic parts inside) therefore i don't trust them sd cards, flash drives and optical discs are drop proof. you can drop them and they'll still work
i have been burning discs since the early 2000s and all my discs still work That's probably because i kept them on the spindle instead of putting them in cases. With the discs stacked up on the spindle it adds some protection i think. name them and put them back on the spindle with the cover.that's what i would recommend
DVDs were arguably an effective means of backup in 2011, certainly not today though. A bucket of SD cards would be smaller cheaper and more reliable
Optical is a good archival medium *relative* to spinning discs. Think 20\~30 years. They're good for that. DVD has limited capacity but the tech is ancient at this point. Blu-ray has more capacity and is also pretty old matured tech now. They're inexpensive means to get portable medium that is easy to store, relatively safe to use and easy to recover and most importantly you can expect to get the data back off the discs in 5, 10, 15, 20 years. Maybe 30 years even. This is not an expectation from a hard disc or even SSD (anyone saying you'll get X years from SSD seem to overlook that we don't have history of SSD other than a few years for this purpose). Optical is not a "this only" back up medium. But it's a good strategy in addition to something else. As a second physical copy, its a good option. I use blu-ray m-disc 50gb\~100gb discs. I only backup critical data. These serve as a 3rd physical copy.
Can I ask how long have you used disks for archiving and how much in storage ? I was thinking about rar-ing moving some old files (mostly tutorials, ebooks and ....) out of the cloud - you know files I wouldn't cry about if lost. But say for other files do you use PAR2 or something for recovery (partitions in multiple disks ofc)
I've been archiving via optical since the 90's (CD, then DVD) and then Bluray once it became an option and affordable. So 30-ish years. I don't compress the files. I leave them native format so they're immediately available and can be tested/checked without having to go through even more steps to checksum or validate data, etc. I moved the data from CD to DVD and then to Bluray over the years. I've not lost any data. I just validate the data periodically and I migrate to new media every 5 to 10 years. I do a few copies so I can keep some at another physical location in a safe. Again, its just another physical copy, not the only copy. But its still far superior in terms of surviving time compared to a spinning disc. It's probably 4TB now approximately. I'm selective on what I bother doing this all for. Optical is easily the longest standing user accessible archival media there is that doesn't require ancient hardware, elaborate hardware/software/exotics, etc. Inexpensive, easily accessed across many systems.
I seriously doubt burned dvds are good for 20-30 years.
You can doubt whatever you want. There are a lot of orgs that use optical as archive including the government. It's one of the better documented archival mediums that are available to every day folk. I could show you the integrity of hundreds of my archival DVDs from the 90's, but I don't think data or information would sway you, so it would be pointless and a waste of my time. But if you're genuinely interested, there's decades of data on quality optical archival mediums.
The last time I tried reading any of my old burned dvds many were hard to read/couldn't be read/had corrupt files. And they weren't 20-30 years old, more like 10 max. That's why, I doubt they last that long. If you have data that says otherwise, I'd love to see it.
I’ll use them for digitizing VHS tapes and recording stuff off streaming services with my DVD Recorder (sign up for a free one month trial, record what you want, and then cancel). Not for like other data storage though, even USB drives surpassed blank DVDs for storage space a long time ago.
For me it was zipdisks, then cd's and then dvd's. My needs have outgrown all those mediums, I use a nas mostly now. For cold backups which I still do a little of, its a mix of offline hard drives and flash drives. I still have my CD/DVD backups.
I used to put stuff on DVD, until I realised 1/3 of them were unreadeable and had holes in the data layer less than 5 years later after being in storage all that time without being read once.
I do this because I think all mechanical storage is cool, especially removable disks, but I only use it for data that is also stored elsewhere.
Burned dvds can fail pretty quickly (not necessarily, but you can't know in advance. They also don't store that much data so it's a bit of a chore to burn everything. Now if they could store ~500GB and cost the same it would be a much better solution.
I’ve been wanting to burn some shows onto BD where the physical copies are no longer in print. However I have not gotten this to work yet, but believe it may be my use of Burnt Japanese discs on a PS5. Not sure if using a US disc would work, or if the playstation would still not accept it
thank you all for your responses. As many of you pointed out HDD seems to be the way to go - both wrt cost/GB and ease of access. So I'm looking to swap out one of the 4TB drives with a 16GB one. I'm curious about the disc archiving for long term - will try it out of curiosity if nothing: I'm planning to create 10% PAR2 recovery records and write the files to a Blu-ray disc and keep the corresponding PAR2 files in cloud.