while people think of backing up their data on blu-ray discs they'd have to buy a blu-ray disc writer and then blank media, when they could have gone to a local store and purchased for an external hard drive, or even an internal hard drive. and yeah i would love to leave my computer on day and night for a week on a p2p server getting an HD DVD movie or a Blu-ray movie. this is the dead format, MASS STORAGE DISCS.
You can't do incremental backups on a hard drive without using up additional hard drive space (obviously), but multiple copies for redundancy or offsite storage requires a whole, new hard drive as opposed to just another blank disc.
Hard drives do not appreciate being unused for long periods of time, which is how most optical media is treated. I've seen a large number of hard drives die very shortly after sitting idle in storage for over a year. Some types of optical media can last up to 30 years if handled and stored properly. Good luck on hard drives coming close to that.
Run out of space? You have to buy a new hard drive, which costs a lot more than buying a blank, optical disc, and you have to spend time transferring that data over. Not a big deal, obviously, but it still could be more of a headache than just popping in another blank disc.
Large-capacity hard drives are fine, but they're still putting all of your eggs in one basket. That would REALLY suck if your primary hard drive died then for some reason a problem is encountered on your external drive that results in the whole thing being lost. (Yes, I have seen that happen, so don't throw any excuses of it being "hypothetically possible" at me.) At least with optical media, you're limiting how much can be lost to a bad disc.
Have you ever formatted the wrong hard drive in a multi-drive system or erased an archival file that shouldn't have been erased? If not, consider yourself to be lucky. At least with write-once optical media, there is no chance of accidentally erasing data.
So, yes, there are most certainly many circumstances in which write-once optical media, while costing more per GB, is a far more favorable alternative to magnetic media. Any other platitudes to throw at us?
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while people think of backing up their data on blu-ray discs they'd have to buy a blu-ray disc writer and then blank media, when they could have gone to a local store and purchased for an external hard drive, or even an internal hard drive. and yeah i would love to leave my computer on day and night for a week on a p2p server getting an HD DVD movie or a Blu-ray movie. this is the dead format, MASS STORAGE DISCS.
Let's see. Where to start...
You can't do incremental backups on a hard drive without using up additional hard drive space (obviously), but multiple copies for redundancy or offsite storage requires a whole, new hard drive as opposed to just another blank disc.
Hard drives do not appreciate being unused for long periods of time, which is how most optical media is treated. I've seen a large number of hard drives die very shortly after sitting idle in storage for over a year. Some types of optical media can last up to 30 years if handled and stored properly. Good luck on hard drives coming close to that.
Run out of space? You have to buy a new hard drive, which costs a lot more than buying a blank, optical disc, and you have to spend time transferring that data over. Not a big deal, obviously, but it still could be more of a headache than just popping in another blank disc.
Large-capacity hard drives are fine, but they're still putting all of your eggs in one basket. That would REALLY suck if your primary hard drive died then for some reason a problem is encountered on your external drive that results in the whole thing being lost. (Yes, I have seen that happen, so don't throw any excuses of it being "hypothetically possible" at me.) At least with optical media, you're limiting how much can be lost to a bad disc.
Have you ever formatted the wrong hard drive in a multi-drive system or erased an archival file that shouldn't have been erased? If not, consider yourself to be lucky. At least with write-once optical media, there is no chance of accidentally erasing data.
So, yes, there are most certainly many circumstances in which write-once optical media, while costing more per GB, is a far more favorable alternative to magnetic media. Any other platitudes to throw at us?