"it would take 120 BD-R disks, and $1,400 in media, using $12 M-Discs"
May be right but mdisc grade storage is way more better on the long run than a simple hdd. Accidental deletion, failures, ransomware are all much larger problems than many thinks when it comes to mediums other than the read only optical disks.
Each time that optical disks are considered, they talk only about the organic dyes of the Cd-r-s. HTL blu rays don't have issues like this, and mdisc blue rays are even more durable.
Agreed, and you don't have to burn everything to BR discs, only the most important stuff.
I've recently bought a synology to store my photos. But I'm questioning my reasoning for this at the moment. The upside is that I have a central place to store photos so they aren't scattered around on different laptops and external drives.
But the downside is that it's all in one place and even with backups it's more vulnerable to a single point failure.
So maybe there is some merit to storing photos on smaller external drives and having a few cheap 500gb drives for each year (and make some copies of course). And then maybe pick the best photos and burn to some HTL BR discs. The biggest problem with external drives is incompatible filesystems and fat32/exfat being susceptible to corruption.
Because honestly I'm not going to take another photo in the year 2020, am I?
So instead of diligently backing up my NAS, securing it from hackers and viruses, hoping btrfs devs wrote unit tests etc (1), I can make a few redundant copies on different hard drives and usb sticks and leave some at my parents house etc.
Theoria Apophasis, a youtuber ("the angry photographer"), has a few rants about long term data storage and archiving.
He is a bit eccentric but imho makes some good points.
Btw, don't watch if you don't want to have nightmares about your hard disk dying any minute now, ignorance is bliss.
(1) Tbh, I also have no faith in synology software, my user experience so far has been pretty disheartening. Photo station & moments are horrible, the dir is hard coded, you can't choose where your photos are stored which is just ridiculous. The backup software doesn't have an archive option for deleted files (like the CCC "Saftey Net" or rclone backup), it can only delete or keep the files.
Also, for example the AFP protocol loses the file modified date:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7547857
My understanding is that they're putting a shiny wrapper on some open source software and reselling for a premium.
Basically this https://xkcd.com/2347/
I want to be that happy enthusiastic person in their promotional material, but the experience is not reassuring. And supposedly everything else on the market is even worse (plenty of Drobo horror stories online).
And now I am trying the Suckology Cloud Sync with Google Drive and after pausing it I'm getting "Unknown error occurs. Please try again later". It's a piece of junk. This particular english phrasing really inspires confidence.
May be right but mdisc grade storage is way more better on the long run than a simple hdd. Accidental deletion, failures, ransomware are all much larger problems than many thinks when it comes to mediums other than the read only optical disks.
Each time that optical disks are considered, they talk only about the organic dyes of the Cd-r-s. HTL blu rays don't have issues like this, and mdisc blue rays are even more durable.