Do-it yourself archiving. If not Blu-ray M-Disk, what?

[stix]

Now that a quality retail Blu-Ray Burner for the PC is just about non-existent for purchase, and with the media so expensive anyway, what is the current thinking on best solutions for Do-it-Yourself home and office archival data backup without using cloud / online options, and for future accessibility when hardware is different?

Thoughts, anyone? Hello?

[Dartman]

Big external hard drive would probably work well. My first backup solution was a 250 meg tape setup and I went up from there but tape got too small and slow to be useful.

[Ian]

There really are no good backup options for consumers besides the cloud. I definitely wouldn't backup anything long term to flash based storage.

[stix]

Thanks for your thoughts Dartman and Ian. Nice to know one can still share some thoughts around here..
Hard to believe it's been 22 - 23 years or more since I started in with this forum.

So back on topic, if "there are no good backup options for consumers besides the cloud", what about corporate and academic environments, what are they doing? They have their own clouds? Magnetic recording tape? Isn't the cloud mostly based on arrays of hard drives and SSDs?

My own stuff is on Hard drives, SSDs and flash drives, depending on what it is and how often I want to get at it, use it, or refresh it, and how long I want it to hold up. I still have a lot of CDs, DVDs and a few BD-R disks, but don't use them much now and never sprung for larger capacity BD-R or M-Disk. Once in a while I sort thru the old disks(cd, dvd) and decide what to keep and what to get rid of or transfer to HDD, and at that point a lot of it is not relevant anymore for me. Still have a load of good blank media.

Speaking of hard drives, what's the prevailing wisdom on CMR vs SMR hard disk drives for various backup and storage purposes?

Best wishes for a good holiday season to everyone !

[Ian]

So back on topic, if "there are no good backup options for consumers besides the cloud", what about corporate and academic environments, what are they doing? They have their own clouds? Magnetic recording tape? Isn't the cloud mostly based on arrays of hard drives and SSDs?

We're a Dell/EMC shop at work and use their Avamar Data Domain product for backups. We use it for traditional backups of things like home directories as well as our VMware environment. It would be a challenge to backup everything to the cloud.

Endpoints are backed up to the cloud. With people being both on and off campus, its easier this way. Getting the client deployed and ensuring that its working... that's the challenge here.