From Terabyte Drives Make It Challenging To Create Regular Backups
If you didn't have so much stuff, you wouldn't need a house, you could just walk around all day....
George Carlin, Peace Be Upon Him, died two weeks ago
I keep thinking if I didn't have so much on disk drives, I wouldn't need such big drives, and so much room to create backups. But when you take into account all the time it takes to blow DVDs along with verifying them, they are almost useless as backup media. When I make a backup from my computer, instead of sitting around and waiting to feed it 4 or 5 dvds, I always set it running to make the backup to an external hard drive. Hence the files just accumulate. I got lured into making those emusic dvds the other day because I didn't have enough spare hard drive space at the time to copy the files off that way. Plus, it just seemed like a good idea to make an offline backup of my music files. Hint: Never rely on a single backup of anything important.
Even with 25gb blue ray disks, which take a really long time to write (maybe 1-2 hours), the problem is just as bad, compared with terabyte external drives, which would require 40 blue ray disks to backup. And the blue ray disks aren't cheap, that backup would probably cost $400 or more if it was done to re-writable blue ray disks. Of course rewritables are a risky proposition, but not too bad if the backup software can do a verify operation on each disk.