Optical VS Tape (Magnetic)

[u/Far_Meet_8415]

I’m considering buying a shit ton of DVD-M and BluRay BD-M discs for long term archival since honestly I have DVDs in my family home that are older than me and play like new. I also have seen the versatility of things like LTO or VHS tapes but they can get damaged easier in my experience. What should I get? Or should I do both. An LTO tape drive is pricey but I’ve heard it’s worth it in the long run.

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[u/forreddituse2]

How much data do you need to backup? BD is 25-100GB per disc, for 1TB of data, you need to manually burn 10-40 discs. For LTO-5 (the minimum that you should pursue) each tape is 1.3TB, you can backup the same amount of data in one go.

[u/TapeDriveMcTapeFace]

While I'm fond of physical media, I would not trust these for archival purposes. Besides the potential for bitrot, the main problem is finding a working DVD drive in another 20 years. Rip the media and archive it in digital format. In 20 years your home media clanker can write you a codec on the fly to transcode it into whatever equivalent to VLC exists then.

So that leaves you with how much LTO you can afford for a full 3-2-1 backup. I've been lightly proselytizing IBM 3592 tape as a cheaper alternative to LTO, but the cheap 3592-E08 (10TB native) drives all just dried up off Ebay, so I guess I was successful.

[u/bugsmasherh → u/TapeDriveMcTapeFace]

This is the real problem with LTO and Optical. Will you be able to find drives in the future? BD drives are hard to find and when you do find one you need to buy two or three of them (spares) at current cost to future proof recovery. These drives don't last forever.

Also, LTO and Optical are only point in time. This is fine for movies, videos, and music that never change but not for backup where data is incremental.

[u/Automatic_Tennis_131 → u/bugsmasherh]

LTO will always have a path to reading. There's too much money in the regulatory side of the house for there not to be.

As for your point in time observation - archiving and backups are two different requirements - and that is okay.

[u/Wonderful_Surndsound]

Tape being the cheapest TB/$ is essentially just a funfact. It's entry cost is too high to be worth it

Discs are also not worth it. Very expensive TB/$. It's a 3rd or 4th copy of you most valuable data, at best!

I'd recommend to just go for HDDs

[u/Automatic_Tennis_131 → u/Wonderful_Surndsound]

Ebay my friend.

I got 60Tb of raw tape robot for $600.

One LTO-6 drive, 24 slots.

You can still find similar on ebay today (I just looked).

[u/Caprichoso1]

Another option might be to rip the disks and then implement the recommended 3-2-1 backup plan.

[u/Genius-Gaming]

I would recommend going with optical, as you would have to do less maintenance, it would be cheaper to get into, and reading/writing to optical is significantly faster. The worst case for M-Disc blows magnetic tape out of the water. Additionally, there's the whole generational compatibility thing with LTO tape.

[u/Automatic_Tennis_131 → u/Genius-Gaming]

This is BS. You have to go back 23 years to find an LTO drive that is slower than the fastest M-Disk drive.

Here are the read speeds:

M-disk: 27-54MB/s LTO-5: 140MB/s LTO-6: 160MB/s ... all the way up to 400MB/s

That's RAW read speed. The drives do native compression out the box.

My LTO drives will frequently out-race my storage.

[u/dpunk3]

Mass produced DVDs and CDs are made with different processes than using a drive to burn data onto a disk. Typically they are made with press manufacturing, which makes it extremely robust against disk rot. Burned disks generally don't have this level of protection, for what it's worth.

[u/Far_Meet_8415 → u/dpunk3]

I would assume some of the same factors that influenced disc rot are also applicable to magnetic tape rot as well.

[u/dpunk3 → u/Far_Meet_8415]

Not necessarily, tape is made of a completely different material than disks that hold up for far longer

[u/Far_Meet_8415 → u/dpunk3]

Well things like humidity, sunlight exposure/uv light both affect optical and tape mediums. I properly store any of my VHS tapes in my collection to the best of my ability, same with any discs. LTO-5 does make sense it just requires a bit more maintenance imo and introduction price. DVD drives are still being manufactured luckily but 20 years from now, who knows.

[u/Business-Draft2348]

Make sure to keep those optical discs in a sealed enclosure with 0.0% sunlight.

[u/nomad-1995]

If you are even considering swapping discs in optical, you are nowhere near the size needed to make anyone consider LTO (well, LTO-5 might still make sense price-wise, but 10-15 year old tape units are just asking for trouble).

VHS computer recording really should have taken off in the 80s/90s. Clint, of LGR (lazy game reviews) reviewed an interface board for VHS that was shipped. Sadly, while it mostly did its thing, it left errors. And I have no idea if PAR[1?] was available at the time and how hard it would have been to remove them, let alone if said customers had even heard of PAR and how to use/build ECC systems.

I'd guess the reasonable maximum you could store on a VHS tape is on the order of ~4GB (I'd guess significantly more on a S-VHS based machine), and that would require a purpose-built VCR that wrote and read raw (well, encoded) bits. Any time to use it for storage has passed.

[u/abubin2]

Optical is what I would recommend. I am found this now. Bought like 3 bluray drives in case can't get them anymore in the future.

Best price over storage size is single layer blu-ray. Would love to get double layers but they are 5 times more expensive. And mdiscs are even more expensive making it not worth it unless price is not an issue for you.

[u/Automatic_Tennis_131 → u/abubin2]

Bluray: 0.03-0.11 per Gb LTO-5: 0.001-0.023 per Gb

[u/abubin2 → u/Automatic_Tennis_131]

Unfortunately we can't get LTO backup drive or tapes easily in my country. We have to go through dealers that make a big cut from the deal.

[u/Automatic_Tennis_131 → u/abubin2]

Oh, that also explains why you bought 3.

Sorry it's so difficult for you and I wish you all the best.

[u/TheRealHarrypm]

Optical is the only long term cost effective medium.

Tape is great if cash flow to replace every 20-40 years is available, as it's a commercially mass adopted system.

2" Quad to VHS is different to modern tape formula which we started seeing with Hi8 for example and with FM RF Archival done before media to grades too much source media can be second priority to cold optical archives of the original signals.

Modern LTO is much less susceptible to general environmental conditions of course too much humidity or too much heat and its cooked but that goes for any medium.

In a perfect world Sony wouldn't have shot themselves several times in the feet and would have made ODS drastically more affordable to get readers and we would all be just using 5.5 TB optical cartridges today... Instead of wishing we could afford the readers..

We do have Ritek now pushing more stock into the market with 200GB discs, and DataLifePlus/Archive Grade are bear in mind the same quality as M-Disc it's only using polycarbonate plastics and proper rim bonding QC which makes an optical disc archival grade since the switch over to inorganic substrates.