Backup to Blue ray that has spanning and encryption? Recommendation?

[Corpy2]

Im looking to backup to Blu ray, and looking for a sofware solution that will give me the following:

1) Spanning: Meaning that if I am backing up half a TB to blue ray, it will keep prompting me to insert disks.

2) Encryption: Using 256 level encryption

Any suggestions?

 

[Hephaestus]

I believe that many backup tools can do that. Dare I say: all modern tools do? Macrium Reflect is consider to be one of the top choices, Paragon backup is another one.

Im looking to backup to Blu ray, and looking for a sofware solution that will give me the following:

1) Spanning: Meaning that if I am backing up half a TB to blue ray, it will keep prompting me to insert disks.

2) Encryption: Using 256 level encryption

Any suggestions?

 

[tkbslc]

Im looking to backup to Blu ray, and looking for a sofware solution that will give me the following:

1) Spanning: Meaning that if I am backing up half a TB to blue ray, it will keep prompting me to insert disks.

2) Encryption: Using 256 level encryption

Any suggestions?

Do you really want to spend 7 hours swapping discs every 20 minutes just to back up 500GB? And then hope that when you do a recovery that all you can find all the discs, that all can be restored and decrypted?

I think you'd have much better odds of recovery and a better experience just making 2 copies on two 500GB HDD and testing them periodically.

That said, most good backup software can do what you want. 256 bit encryption is considered no more secure than 128 bit, by the way, so don't get hung up on that.

 

[Corpy2]

Im looking to backup to Blu ray, and looking for a sofware solution that will give me the following:

1) Spanning: Meaning that if I am backing up half a TB to blue ray, it will keep prompting me to insert disks.

2) Encryption: Using 256 level encryption

Any suggestions?

Do you really want to spend 7 hours swapping discs every 20 minutes just to back up 500GB? And then hope that when you do a recovery that all you can find all the discs, that all can be restored and decrypted?

I think you'd have much better odds of recovery and a better experience just making 2 copies on two 500GB HDD and testing them periodically.

That said, most good backup software can do what you want. 256 bit encryption is considered no more secure than 128 bit, by the way, so don't get hung up on that.

No, I don't, but it seems that there are not good answers.

At least with Blu Ray it will not die.

 

[gs85739az]

For the cost of all the BR disc you'll need, you could buy an SSD, it'd be much more reliable than any disc...or even a spinning disc would be at bargain prices, also time spent would diminish with no changing of BR disc,etc...just say'n...

 

[skyglider]

Im looking to backup to Blu ray, and looking for a sofware solution that will give me the following:

1) Spanning: Meaning that if I am backing up half a TB to blue ray, it will keep prompting me to insert disks.

2) Encryption: Using 256 level encryption

Any suggestions?

Do you really want to spend 7 hours swapping discs every 20 minutes just to back up 500GB? And then hope that when you do a recovery that all you can find all the discs, that all can be restored and decrypted?

I think you'd have much better odds of recovery and a better experience just making 2 copies on two 500GB HDD and testing them periodically.

That said, most good backup software can do what you want. 256 bit encryption is considered no more secure than 128 bit, by the way, so don't get hung up on that.

No, I don't, but it seems that there are not good answers.

I agree with tkbslc. It's way beyond my patience to do a lot of optical disc swapping every week to do my backups (if you backup weekly). If I had to do that, my backup frequency would be very far apart.

At least with Blu Ray it will not die.

In my entire life, I've never had a backup hard drive die. But then I only connect my external backup drives while doing backups. The rest of the time they are in storage with no power applied. ..... (Note that as a bench mark, in my entire life I've had many working hard drives die.)

Think about it, the odds are infinitesimal that two drives (your internal drive and your backup drive that's stored without power applied) would fail at the same time. If you have two backup hard drives and alternate backups to them, the odds are beyond infinitesimal.

Sky

 

[mfait]

Im looking to backup to Blu ray, and looking for a sofware solution that will give me the following:

1) Spanning: Meaning that if I am backing up half a TB to blue ray, it will keep prompting me to insert disks.

2) Encryption: Using 256 level encryption

Any suggestions?

Do you really want to spend 7 hours swapping discs every 20 minutes just to back up 500GB? And then hope that when you do a recovery that all you can find all the discs, that all can be restored and decrypted?

I think you'd have much better odds of recovery and a better experience just making 2 copies on two 500GB HDD and testing them periodically.

That said, most good backup software can do what you want. 256 bit encryption is considered no more secure than 128 bit, by the way, so don't get hung up on that.

No, I don't, but it seems that there are not good answers.

At least with Blu Ray it will not die.

How often do you plan to do backups.

I backup every few days onto a second hard drive installed in the computer, and once a week to an external hard drive that is only connected during backups (otherwise it is stored out of site).

• If the computer blows up I will only lose maximum of 1 week worth of files as I can recover data from the external hard drive.
• If the internal backup hard drive dies I replace it without any loss of data.
• If the internal main drive dies I replace it and restore data from the backup drive.
• It is highly unlikely for both internal hard drive to die at the same time.

Therefore the death of a singe hard drive is a minor inconvenience.

How often do you plan to backup to blue-ray?

• If its often, it's going to be a PITA!
• If every couple of weeks you potentially lose more data is not backed up.

I'm with tkbslc on this one!

 

[tkbslc]

Im looking to backup to Blu ray, and looking for a sofware solution that will give me the following:

1) Spanning: Meaning that if I am backing up half a TB to blue ray, it will keep prompting me to insert disks.

2) Encryption: Using 256 level encryption

Any suggestions?

Do you really want to spend 7 hours swapping discs every 20 minutes just to back up 500GB? And then hope that when you do a recovery that all you can find all the discs, that all can be restored and decrypted?

I think you'd have much better odds of recovery and a better experience just making 2 copies on two 500GB HDD and testing them periodically.

That said, most good backup software can do what you want. 256 bit encryption is considered no more secure than 128 bit, by the way, so don't get hung up on that.

No, I don't, but it seems that there are not good answers.

At least with Blu Ray it will not die.

I'm not as confident as you are. Probably only half of my DVD-R from 10 years ago still work without errors. With a HDD you can easily rotate to a new one every year or two to ensure it is functional.

To compound that, if you encrypt and use proprietary backup formats with spanning, you may need EVERY disc to work in order to get any data. So at the very least, I'd make sure each disc is recoverable on its own if you go that route.

 

[Corpy2]

Ok, thanks all for your comments.

I have decided on two things

1) Acronis Trueimage for the initial backup with the system, and put that away,

2) Cyber Power2Go with non-spanning encryption to BD-R. Each disk has its own encryption, and on each disk is a decrypt program.

 

[plain text]

What brand of discs will you use?

 

[tkbslc]

Ok, thanks all for your comments.

I have decided on two things

1) Acronis Trueimage for the initial backup with the system, and put that away,

2) Cyber Power2Go with non-spanning encryption to BD-R. Each disk has its own encryption, and on each disk is a decrypt program.

Seems reasonable.

 

[Corpy2]

What brand of discs will you use?

About half a year ago J&R (now defunct) had a ridiculous sale on SONY BD-R AccuCore blue 25GB disks, so I bought a bunch. It was short notice, and I thought that they can't be too bad. I have burend about 12 of them so far, and not a coaster. I burn these at 10x (oops. Wait. I just looked this up. They are listed at 6x, but my recorder wanted to record at 12x. I thought I was being conservative at 10x. Looks like I need to reduce).

Which website will have a review of Blu Ray to advise which is the best quality, I wonder?

 

[plain text]

Corpy2,

Thanks for your reply - I had been considering a similar strategy but never found discs well-regarded enough to trust for backup.

I was hoping for a strong recommendation - I'll look into the Sony discs you mentioned.

 

[Matt105483]

Im looking to backup to Blu ray, and looking for a sofware solution that will give me the following:

1) Spanning: Meaning that if I am backing up half a TB to blue ray, it will keep prompting me to insert disks.

2) Encryption: Using 256 level encryption

Any suggestions?

Do you really want to spend 7 hours swapping discs every 20 minutes just to back up 500GB? And then hope that when you do a recovery that all you can find all the discs, that all can be restored and decrypted?

I think you'd have much better odds of recovery and a better experience just making 2 copies on two 500GB HDD and testing them periodically.

That said, most good backup software can do what you want. 256 bit encryption is considered no more secure than 128 bit, by the way, so don't get hung up on that.

No, I don't, but it seems that there are not good answers.

At least with Blu Ray it will not die.

why is that?

If BDR discs are anything like DVDR then they will very well die and probably much sooner as you think

 

[Jim Cockfield]

I find it amazing that anyone would have the patience to backup 500GB of data to optical media, swapping disks, etc.

You do realize that you can buy a USB 3.0 attached 1TB hard drive for around $50 now, right?

Of course, they'll also work with USB 2.0 ports (you just don't get the faster USB 3.0 speed that way).

If you use compressed backups, you could hold several (or even more) 500B backups on a single 1TB drive. Then use another 1TB drive for an extra copy of the same backups, rotating them off site in case of fire, flood, theft, etc.

That would be dramatically easier (not to mention a lot faster) compared to trying to use an optical disk solution with multiple discs involved.

Then, just copy the backup drives to new drives every few years or so for better long term reliability.

Also, unlike other solutions (different types of optical discs, etc.), I don't see USB attached Mass Storage Devices (e.g., USB attached hard drives) being obsolete anytime soon.

Instead, the standards will just continue to evolve (as we've seen with USB 1.1 to USB 2.0 to USB 3.0; and the latest USB 3.1 drives coming soon; with standards that are backwards and forwards compatible, so that you can use the latest USB 3.0 drives on older USB port types; and vice-versa where you can use the older USB drive types on newer USB port types.

With Optical Discs, they're more likely to be like the variety of floppy discs used in the past, where you may buy a new computer and have no easy way to read them.

Again, just the time involved to backup that much data to optical discs seems nuts to me, not to mention the number of discs needed to perform the backups and keep track of. So, I'd do yourself a favor and buy a couple of 1TB USB 3.0 attached portable drives for that purpose instead.

Also, be very careful about the type of encryption software you're using. Otherwise, you may find that the programs you need to decrypt the data are not even able to run on newer operating systems later down the road. I'd stick to open source standards, and use open source programs (with downloadable source code) that can be recompiled to work with newer operating systems as time passes.

--
JimC
------

 

[Jen Yates]

Sorry, but you are a fool if you're thinking of backing up to BluRay when HDD prices are so cheap and proven to be a reliable backup destination.

If you worry about a drive failing (I do!) then use multiple destinations.

If the questions is "In 2014 what sort of backup system should I run?"

The answer might contain the would cloud, it might probably contain the words external drive and it will almost certainly contain the word multiple. Hell if you're paranoid it might even contain the word encrypted.

But never the words blu and ray. Never ever.

Never ever with sprinkles on top.

 

[Corpy2]

Sorry, but you are a fool if you're thinking of backing up to BluRay when HDD prices are so cheap and proven to be a reliable backup destination.

If you worry about a drive failing (I do!) then use multiple destinations.

If the questions is "In 2014 what sort of backup system should I run?"

The answer might contain the would cloud, it might probably contain the words external drive and it will almost certainly contain the word multiple. Hell if you're paranoid it might even contain the word encrypted.

But never the words blu and ray. Never ever.

Never ever with sprinkles on top.

You must be a delight to deal with in the real world. when you throw insults around so freely and without provocation.

I do want to point out that the failure of one BD does not mean that an entire 2 TB or 4 TB drive has died, along with its data. And we do find from time to time that when one drive fails, it turns out that the other has failed sometime in the past of the former, without notice, and one is left with no data.

With no spanning, at least with BD one has lost only one disk of data. And if one has 2 copies of each disk, then one is much better off.

 

[Tom_N]

"Encrypted" and "back up" – two phrases that don't go well together.

All it takes is for you to forget your encryption key, or to misplace the piece of paper on which you wrote it, and your backup becomes so much trash. Not that you'll find this out right away. Maybe you'll find it out months later when your hard drive dies and you really NEED that backup!

 

[Corpy2]

"Encrypted" and "back up" – two phrases that don't go well together.

All it takes is for you to forget your encryption key, or to misplace the piece of paper on which you wrote it, and your backup becomes so much trash. Not that you'll find this out right away. Maybe you'll find it out months later when your hard drive dies and you really NEED that backup!

I would normally agree, but for the following:

1) (This is not a promo) With Power2Go, the backup program writes the decryption program to each encrypted disk. When one inserts the disk, the program runs, and asks for the decryption password. Then the full backed up list of files appears in the clear.

2) I won't forget my password, because it is "FlyingQ8245"

Just kidding. Maybe.

Actually, I do have two concerns:

1) If a disk goes bad, and is encrypted, then it is probably more likely to be a total loss than if it were not. I am not certain of this, but I am analogizing HD's. I may be completely wrong.

2) I assume a future in which programs that run under Windows 7 and 8 will continue to run. Probably not true in a few decades, but I should have plenty of warning before it happens. I mean, we can still sort of run DOS programs.

 

[Chris Noble]

Im looking to backup to Blu ray,

Any suggestions?

Don't. DVD-Rs (Blue-Ray or conventional) are unreliable, have limited life, and are unwieldy. HDDs are better in every way.