Hey ya!
I’m in the process of marking some archive copies of working files. At the moment I thought it might be best to zip files (using 7zip, store only, not compressed) and then writing that one file to the disc. I thought it might better than putting the files on the disc ‘loose’ but I don’t really know. I just like the speed of moving one zip file around the network when needed, instead of tonnes of individual files that copy over at a tedious rate.
Any thoughts?
Cheers!
Hmm, I’m not sure how a store only 7zip is stored/read, and if it’s suitable to optical media.
There is a project designed for archiving to optical media explicitly, that’s perhaps a better choice?
Why do you want to archive to blu ray exactly? Except for longevity I don’t see any compelling arguments…
I would just burn the files to disk as is.
If you want to be extra safe you can do winrar with par2 files which provides some rebuild in case of any rar file is damaged. I can provide a guide on how to do that if you want but is pretty simple that you can also find by searching for it.
Are BluRay writables good for long term storage? I’ve had friends pull out old DVD-R and CD-R spindles and a lot of them are in bad shape. Even in decent climate control, the labels have peeled off of several of them, and those labels contain the data.
Unlike a pressed disc, writable use a layer of ink. They don’t really have the longevity. Not sure if BD-Rs are any better.
Blu-rays are still not so terrible compared to CDs and DVDs. But they’ve taken away all the great archival options. M-DISCs might no longer be M-DISCs and Archival Disc (for professional/business use) has also been canned by Sony recently. So much for a half-century lifespan when the readers for the format has been discontinued in just under a decade. 
I’ve heard some of Sony’s 128 GB BDXL discs are the same sort as the “platters” in their Archival Disc cartridges, so that may be the next best.
Ah, thanks for that. So far it seems OK, but I’ll veer away from it in future (I’ve only done a few burns with 7zip files stored on the disc).
Ah, that’s interesting, cheers!
It’s really to store duplicates that I don’t have the patience to go through and check. I’ve also done some that are general snapshots of files, in case everything was to completely fail…and a lot has to fail before they’re used. I currently have files stored on 8 drive wide RAIDZ2 pools, that are backed-up to a secondary RAIDZ2 pool on another machine. And then, another machine with a RAIDZ1 pool has a copy as well. Backblaze is also used for critical files. Thing is, drives are becoming quite expensive, so I’m trying to use them more efficiently, instead of buying yet more drives.
I recently spent 2 days sifting through duplicates using duplicate finder S/W (TreeSize Personal, by JamSoftware), that recovered 2-3TB of space, which was nice!
Cheers for that, would you mind doing a simple guide please? Welcome it via PM or in this thread, whichever you prefer 
To be honest, this is my first rodeo with BluRay disks. Like your friends I’ve had good and bad experiences with the readability, but things like this give me a little bit of faith…of course everyone’s mileage may vary.
What I’m not depending on are these holding super critical data that’s not replicated elsewhere - I’m not planning to put all my eggs in one basket!
Yes I read about M-Discs, pity eh! I have bought a spare Blu Ray drive just in case, and like everyone (may be), have around half a dozen reader only drives that have been safely stored, just in case.
Let’s face it though, once I moved files from the old 3.5" drives to hard drives, I never needed that drive system installed ever again. Mind you, I’ll still be interested to know if they last a good amount of time - personally, I just need a decade or so 
Already plenty of guides online see below
First do a multipart winrar or split 7zip archive parts ( quickpar can be used with any type of files )
and then create the par2 files with quickpar
Other thoughts:
Had a quick look at that optical media durability blog, and they’ve fallen into the classic trap of looking at the brand, not the actual disc manufacturer and model. Very few brands made their own discs, and there weren’t even consistent in which manufacturers they sourced their discs from.
Panasonic BD-R were always the gold standard (& made their own discs, in Japan), but they are extremely scarce and hard to find (large volume production probably stopped years ago). Sony made great BD-R too, but their own production of single & dual layer discs ended a long time ago. And retail Sony BD-R were normally rebranded discs from another manufacturer, and if they carried Sony’s media ID code production had been outsourced.
To get good quality BD-R these days the easiest source is probably Verbatim. (It’s been a few years since I last bought some, it’s possible thinga may have changed. It may also vary by region - I live in Europe.) Their regular retailed branded discs (which may say ‘Datalife’) should still be rebranded CMC Magnetics discs. These are OK, but nothing special. Back in the old days on CDFreaks I don’t remember any horror stories of data loss (unlike Ritek’s BD-R), just that the ‘disc quality’ (correctable data error rates) varied a lot. But Verbatim used to get the better discs.
The best bet now for good quality BD-R is probably Verbatim’s white label ‘DatalifePlus’ range aimed at the professional market. These are more expensive, but the discs should have Verbatim’s own MID code, Verbatim’s own design and made to their specification. My experience over the past decade is that they have always been excellent quality. Production is almost certainly still outsourced to Taiwan (probably CMC Magnetics) although if you see made in Singapore that’s Verbatim’s own factory (unlikely for SL discs).
Falcon Media (FTI) in the UAE is probably the last large scale high quality manufacturer of optical discs. Their discs of all kinds normally use TDK media codes and specifications, licensed from TDK (not used without permission - media code piracy/couterfeiting was once a major problem) and the quality is excellent. Their own braded discs are aimed at the professional market. They also make discs for other brands. (Made in the UAE should = FTI.) But they stopped their BD-R production a decade ago. Their discs were excellent, one of the favourites on CDFreaks. However they stopped making them because the quality wasn’t quite as super-consistent as they wanted. (We rarely had any complaints, and the less good batches were still very good and reliable.) They might have started production again, I’m not certain.
I’ve never used M-Disc media before. As well as the high price, I was always put off my their misleading (and at times outright untruthful) marketing. They were never clear about the nature of the material used for the recording layer and often made statments which were contradictary or impossible. But as far as I know the performance of their discs was fine, no reason to avoid them just don’t believe all the marketing.
#1: I do backups to a 8TB internal HDD, then copy that to an external 12TB WD hard drive.
I use Mini Tool Shadow Maker Free to back up C:/Windows (compressed). Then I use SyncBack Free to copy everything else, as Raw uncompressed files.
#2: Chances are (hopefully) you are going to never use that BluRay backup.
I would zip them to save disc space. If it takes a little while to unzip, it won’t matter as long as it is secure and works when you need it.
Store only is fine if you’ve got a butt load of small files and want to transfer them as fast as possible.
Thank you very much
Thank you very much @LiKenun @Ibex @positroned and @MorbidEden Really appreciate all the info you’ve written, very very helpful!
By more luck than judgement I’ve been using some Verbatim, so hopefully they’ll do the trick. I’ve had no bad writes to far - pretty good compared with my past experience (10+ years ago) when it was a non-zero event!
Thank you again all! 
Apologies if stating the obvious, but always verify optical discs after writing. Unlike HDDs, floppies, flash drives etc. there is no verification as they are written. (Unless you’re using packet writing.) Even on enthusiast optical disc forums back in the day, there were many people who didn’t verify after writing. (I suspect many, even most, cases of discs losing data back then were because they were never readable in the first place & weren’t verified. Rather than disc degredation - although that did happen also.)
I had an additional problem when I began using BD-R, which was sometimes the discs would pass verification in Nero (or whichever disc writing software I used), but the files were still corrupt. In the end I concluded it was probably a combination of Windows (8.x onwards doesn’t handle optical discs generally as well as 7 or XP, in my experience) and my laptop. The data must have been corrupted before it reached the drive. Ever since then I verify the files a second time against the originals using CDCheck (or another file comparison tool).
