[mythtv-users] Anyone archiving to Blu-Ray Disks?

[Scott Alfter]

On 8 Jul 10 06:49, Eric Sharkey wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 9:30 AM, Brian Wood <beww at beww.org> wrote:
>> and most of them need a wall wart, take up space, generate
>> heat and are a PIA in general.
> 
> It does need a wall wart, but the drive automatically spins down when
> not in use (which is most of the time, since recordings don't go
> there) so heat/power is minimal.  It's been painless.

There are drive enclosures with internal power supplies that just take a
standard power cord of some sort (some 2-pin, some 3-pin).  All of the ones
I've seen are 5.25" enclosures intended for use with DVD burners and such, but
you can just as easily stick a hard drive in one.  I did that recently with a
2TB hard drive and this enclosure to back up my movies:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817145051

ESATA would've been nice, but USB is fast enough for rsyncing stuff from
primary storage on a NAS box to the backup drive.

FWIW, I've been looking into a second backup recently so that I can have one
off-site (will probably bring it to the office).  When I first considered BD-R
as a backup medium, it was too expensive.  Fry's recently had 100-pack spindles
of 25GB BD-Rs for $100...should've jumped on it, as the per-GB cost was finally
competitive with hard drives.  I didn't, though, and they were gone when I went
back last week to pick some up. :-( I ended up picking up three of these instead:

http://www.buy.com/prod/memorex-blu-ray-bd-r-25gb-4x-spindle-30-pack/q/loc/101/214681515.html

$38 for 30 isn't quite as good as $100 for 100, but it's not too much more and
they're offering free shipping.  I knocked together a script that breaks up
files into 64MB chunks and generates PAR2 recovery files for them:

#!/bin/sh
fn=`echo "$1" | sed "s/.*\///g"`
ln -s "$1" "$fn"
lxsplit -s "$fn" 64M
rm "$fn"
par2create -r10 -u "$fn".par2 "$fn".*

(This should be run in a directory other than the one where your movies live;
the symlink is created temporarily because lxsplit only writes its files to the
same directory as the source file AFAIK.)

This should maximize disk usage and hopefully enable recovery from the
occasional error in the backup.  Most of the time, something like "cat
/mnt/cdrom/foo.mkv.[0-9]* >foo.mkv" should be sufficient for recovery.  Burning
dozens of BD-Rs will take a while, but it's not necessary to babysit the
burner, and the backup set won't take up as much space as if I had used DVD-Rs.
 (DVD-R backup would be cheaper still, but would use 5x as many disks.  DVD-R
DL would only use 2.5-3x as many disks, but those are even more expensive
per-GB than BD-R.)

Scott Alfter
scott at alfter.us