[mythtv-users] Options for Backing up Myth data

[Andre]

On 6 Dec 2010, at 19:06, Brian Wood wrote:

> Wow, the "2 TB Hard Drive Recommendations" thread has got pretty long, 
> and seems to be drifting towards backup solutions, so I thought I'd 
> start a new better-named one.
> 
> The DLTs I use are not terribly practical for most folks, and even I'd 
> like to find something better, in case my media source dries up.
> 
> Somewhat related to something I asked a few weeks ago:
> 
> What about using Blu-Ray disks for backup?

I make blurays of HD shows I really want to keep, or DVDs but there's not much SD I want to keep :-(

Once the transport stream is remuxed, extraneous eit, teletext and commercials are removed the show is almost half it's recorded size and I don't need to restore the files to myth to play the show. It's very time consuming so it has to be something really worth keeping. It would be great to do this from inside myth even if it was "only" AVCHD disks (I know, patches welcome...) but for now I use Toast on my Mac.
 
I found printable BD-Rs for ~£3.75 each on a spindle of 25, I think that's cheap enough to back up a few TV shows, I usually get five or six hours of video on a disk.

But then I occasionally need to make blurays for work so investing in the hardware & software is less painful.

Hadn't really considered BD-R as a backup medium, way too small and way too slow, my photo library alone would need 12 disks, smells of the days of backing up to boxes of floppy disks! I suspect that by the time multi layer BD-Rs are available and affordable they will be far too small and slow too.

I have a bunch of dat drives, zip drives and a couple of those horrible floppy interface tape drives, none of them worked very well, they were never big enough or anywhere near fast enough to be useful.

For now my core files, photos, correspondence and accounts are on my laptop, my old (now spare) laptop, the server, server incremental backup disk and an off site backup in Scotland. I use an rsync recipe that allows me to keep daily backups in directly accessible linked folders, (google time machine for linux) I've been bitten too many times by clever arse backup "systems" where you need a backup system to restore your backup!

Ah, glad you brought this subject up, I just realised that my recent re-organisation of myth storage (to avoid buying any more failure prone drives) means that my DB backups are now on the same disk as the DB, oops!

> 
> BR recorders are getting below $100 (though probably not in NZ yet), and 
> the media is starting to get more realistic.
> 
> Granted optical media has some problems, but in the case of video files, 
> may be "good enough". I could put up with an occasional dropout, or even 
> a lost program, and could of course make two or even three backups of 
> really important programming (if there is such a thing).
> 
> Except for using hard drives, I'm not aware of any other storage 
> solution that can store 50GB for a dollar or two.
> 
> Are BRs "better" than using hard drives for backup, and if so, why or 
> why not?
> 
> I think Myth systems want two different types of backup, the programming 
> itself, and the other bits of the system needed to restore the system to 
> a working condition in the event of some sort of catastrophe.
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> 
> 
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