On Wed, Jul 09, 2025 at 12:49:49PM -0400, Geoff Steckel wrote: > What do people use for long term/archival storage?
BD-R. But at least in my experience it's getting more difficult to find good quality media. Plus the ~46 Gb capacity of BD-R DL discs is a tedious limitation when backing up volumes in the Tb range. Unfortunately, Archival Disc and ODA have now been discontinued, so BD-R is basically the largest capacity optical disc format that is widely commercially available. There are probably a few used ODS-D55U units up for grabs, but they likely won't be cheap and how long they'll continue working without maintenance and support, I couldn't say. Here at work I've got multiple BD-R drives for archiving large data sets, which makes it more tollerable. In a home environment that's probably not going to be cost effective. It's easy to find criticism of optical storage, (especially by people who don't use it), but it's still a good choice if you want to write your data once and expect that physical media to last a reasonable time, rather than migrating it every few years to the latest flavour of LTO, for example.
