Blu-Ray for backup storage

[mlfixer]

Here is an interesting article about Facebook's Cold Storage utilizing blu-ray CDs

http://datacenterfrontier.com/inside-facebooks-blu-ray-cold-storage-data-center/

I'm curious if any of you offer blu-ray backups as a service to your clients, for archival purposes. I'm thinking of offering this to my customers. Maybe offer to backup their drives every few weeks to a bluray disc for a fee. You can get blu-ray media that stores 100gb these days. It is not cheap if you get to the 100gb size but i also think it is safer than having data stored on mechanical drives (in the cloud or locally). 25gb disks are not too expensive....

thoughts?

 

[OaksLabs]

I use Blu-Ray for my internal backups (like ISO files, .exe utilities, etc...). The major issue with customers is that not very many PCs support Blu-Ray....so you'd have to sell external drives that could read the disks. Here's the twist: you get 100GB on a triple layer Blu-Ray. I have not looked for a USB external triple layer BD-R, but if it is on the market it will be expensive. But if you stick with the single layer 25GB disks you won't have the "layer matching" problem.

For long term archival storage, look at these (DVDs and Blu-Rays): http://www.mdisc.com/.

 

[mlfixer]

I have two external blu-ray drives that I would utilize. My thought was to do this during a service call. Once I have client's PC I would create the backup on a bluray if they agreed to it before hand.

Thanks for the link to the M-Disc site, looks like my Asus 12x burner supports their 25gb CDs, awesome! Selling someone 1,000 year M-DISC longevity shouldn't be difficult.

 

[OaksLabs]

I have two external blu-ray drives that I would utilize. My thought was to do this during a service call. Once I have client's PC I would create the backup on a bluray if they agreed to it before hand.

Ok. From a business point of view, if you could get good wholesale pricing on them, I think you could turn a good sale selling them too (but onsite service would bring in more money for you, so it's a win-win). I would just make sure to tell customers that they can't restore the data themselves to avoid the angry phone calls about "the backup won't work."

 

[cypress]

I have yet to see a customer with a Blu ray drive on their PC. Heck, I don't even have one. Only on my PS4.

 

[TimM]

No I don't, and I never will. I've almost never seen a Blu-ray drive on a customer's computer, and they take far too long to write a backup. They've never been popular on computers and never will be in a world of USB3 and the cloud.
I'll start offering them when I get the old fax machine plugged back in and have a hitching rail and a horse trough out the front.

 

[Markverhyden]

I'll never bother. Had to many bad experiences with CD's and DVD's to trust this technology for critical backups. Given the prices for external spindles it makes more sense to just get multiple drives as needed.

 

[mlfixer]

Sounds like I found a niche! awesome!