Foo - Long term storage of DVD+R media

Anyone know if storing DVD+R media (namely Retrospect backup sets burned to DVD+R for long term archival) in the round cakeboxes, with the cakeboxes on their side (so the DVDs are vertical rather than stacked atop of each other) is OK in the long run?

The reason I ask is that I end up with lots of DVDs (400 or so) when I do a quarterly copy of all my drives, and even shoeboxes full of DVDs in envelopes takes a lot of shelf space.

2 TB? Sheesh. That ain't bad.

It sounds like storing them with the discs verticle is recommended, because supposedly they can start to bow if stored flat (although at face value that sounds backwards to me, but I'm seeing this cited in multiple places online).

How long do you need them to last? DVD's will easily last 3 months...in fact, they should last a quarter century. Keep them in a relatively cool, temperature stable, dry place away from sunlight. If you're doing long-term archiving, storing a complete archive of that much data every quarter is almost always overkill. You might want to rethink your policy or try to eliminate unnecessary data.

You might also consider network attached storage or tape drives.

There's tape drives now that can store something like 800 GB on a single cartridge, although they're rather spendy, and at ~100 GB/hour transfer rates, it will take an entire day to back up 2 TB.

Here's some tips and discussion on archiving:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/11/1714232&from=rss

Thanks for the info. I've looked into tape drives, Blu-ray drives, and Iomega's removables and stacks of DVDs is the second best price per gig next to high end tape drives, but right now, I can't afford the $3-5k for a decent LTO or AIT drive, so having to make do with piles of DVD+Rs.

As for life, I wouldn't mind them lasting at least 5-10 years, if possible. Its less long term archiving than having a backup of all my PCs stored offsite so if something happens to my place, I can still restore various projects I'm working on.

What about using an old pc with a big ole HD and using something like freeNAS to manage your backups?

I ue dvd's for cursory backups, I have very little faith in media type backups as my first layer backup.

How about afew of those portable hard drives with a 500gb capacity?

I have a spindle of CD-Rs that are now about 12 years old, and have tried reading them back with no problems.

However, I've found it depends a lot on the brand. The 12 year old CDs are Kodak gold datalifes (that I paid nearly $5 each for). Recently I tried reading back data from a cheapo house brand CD that I wrote only about 18 months ago and couldn't get all the data off.

I've had significant trouble with DVDs too, usually on name brand discs. Now I use only Taiyo Yuiden, and have not had any trouble since then. TY is the best. Big name brands are generally whatever they could buy cheap that week, I don't trust them. The mfg sig on them changes too often to trust.

Even so, however, I feel that it's not safe to trust only one backup media type. One unforeseen problem with the media can wreck all your backups.

So for stuff that's important, I use a local "warm" backup (750GB drive up on my MythTV box) and local DVD copies, and also offsite DVD and an external 750G that I store at work (all encrypted in case they're stolen). For REALLY important stuff, I also keep a copy offsite on an 8GB thumb drive. This is mainly copies of documents like birth certificates, drivers licenses, bank statements, financial documents, etc. All encrypted of course. The kind of stuff that will make things a hell of a lot easier if you have your house burn down or something.

I also have processes that run on my internal machines that copy data around between them in case of single drive failures.

Also, be sure you're running S.M.A.R.T. monitoring on all drives so you've got a chance of getting a warning before a drive fails.

Also, be sure you're running S.M.A.R.T. monitoring on all drives so you've got a chance of getting a warning before a drive fails.

Only a few HD brands have S.M.A.R.T. I have six drives from four different manufacturers, and not one of them has that functionality.