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I tried to embrace BD-Rs for backups, and to some degree they are useful, but ultimately I have given up on them.

The 25GB discs are cheap, and have enough space for a considerable backup (depending on your needs). It's also possible to put 4K h264/h265 videos on one and play them on some players, but this isn't very convenient compared to other options.

The 50/100/128GB discs are far more expensive per GB, and have an awful failure rate for writing.

Write and read speeds leave a lot to be desired. Fast enough to stream video, but that's about it.

And consumer writable optical media has a poor lifespan, and will probably become corrupted within a decade.

I have moved on to LTO tapes. A single LTO-6 tape is about $10, and holds 100x more than a basic single-layer BD-R. Read and write speeds over 1gbps. Not appropriate for everyday access, but perfect for large long-term backups.

If I want to move files from device to device, especially multimedia, I just use a flash drive.



For home use hard drives seem to be about the same price, but much more convenient and take less space.


The tapes are cheap. The drives are not at all cheap, unfortunately.


LTO-6 drives are $300-400 on eBay.


Not on NZ sites. Maybe I should be looking at overseas sources.




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