Backing Up Old Projects

[Maj]

Capturing uncompressed video at 480p takes up a lot of hard drive space, so i usually back up my old clips/projects onto an external hard drive. I used to archive everything onto CDs and DVDs, but that became impractical when i got my current capture card.

It seems like Blu-Ray discs and writers have finally become affordable enough for me to consider using them instead. Has anyone done any research on external Bu-Ray burners recently? Basically these are my priorities, in this order:

1) Data accuracy.
2) Storage lifetime.
3) Write speed.

Honestly i don't really care about write speed that much. When i back something up, i just want to be sure that all files are copied accurately and that the discs will last a long time. I know external hard drives are very popular nowadays, but they tend to fail after a few years whereas optical media is supposed to last decades, right? So anyone have any recommendations?

[Magnetro]

Sorry, I'm not sure about the specific questions you asked, but I was just going to mention that if you compress your data, it should be much, much, smaller sine it's uncompressed.

[Maj]

Compressing the souce files into RAR archives reduces them down to about 1/3 size, but i still end up with like 3-5 GB per TACV episode. I don't want to keep track of that many DVDs, so being able to store 25 GB on BD seems a lot more convenient.

[error1]

Error correction is handled differently but is similiar in capability to dvd's and Cd's.
Longevity is predicted to be 15-30 years, but I don't know if that is for BD-R or normal BD
1x speed = 36mb/s
To write an entire BD-R is ~95 min x1 speed, ~7min. x14 speed.

[Buttermaker]

I don't recommend relying on optical discs for backups of things you can't afford to lose. I haven't looked into Blu-ray burning, but when it comes to DVDs, it goes like this:

You need high quality discs, such as Taiyo Yuden or Verbatim's DVD+R with the media code "MCC 004". MCC 004 made in Taiwan are rated higher than those from India.

You need a burner capable of high quality burns. In order to verify those burns, the burner must be capable of scanning. Then you can check your discs with tools like Nero DiscSpeed and Opti Drive Control. Of course you'll have to scan them regularly to make sure they're still in good shape. Here's a random post about the horrors of DVD burning.

Forget optical discs. Hard drives are the way to go for home users.

A proper backup strategy means having three copies of your stuff. If you have only two copies and one breaks, you don't have a backup until you replace the broken drive and make a new backup. But what if there's a break-in or a fire? If you don't have a place where you can store a drive off-site, look into online backup services. I've heard good things about Backblaze.

[CPS2]

At some point I'm probably gonna get a NAS and just access everything from there. And have the NAS in some sort of RAID array with backups. Haven't looked too deeply into it yet, but they don't seem too expensive really. The main thing would be just having another thing drawing electricity constantly, but they probably have ones with sleep mode or something. Anyone here have a setup like that? I even heard one dude hooks up a HDD straight to his router but I tried that and it just disabled my network.

[Buttermaker]

You've probably heard this before: RAID is not a backup.

The IcyDock MB981U3-1SA Docking Station could be useful. Here's a review.