Anyway, if you look farther up on the post. I was the first one to mention that I backup via BD-R. Holographic comes out later, then I will move to that. I am flexible.
Sigh.
I know. We're going round and round in circles. I meant:
For your average home user with access only to an average BD-RW drive, it doesn't make sense to back-up to optical media anymore. You may disagree, that's fine. I've explained my reasons. Pointing out that high-end, multi-million dollar auto-loading/recording systems can handle backing up to optical media in an automated and reliable fashion, doesn't help end-users.
For end users, backing a large, ever-growing collection up to optical discs is a non-starter. Even if you think you'll do it, you won't, and your backup will be badly out of date.
Changers are still cheaper than hard disc, and the audio/video is better via the changer.
No they aren't and no it isn't.
Magnetic:
Thermaltake BlacX USB3 Docking Station, one-time-cost:
$482 x 3TB WD Green Drive:
$169.99 shipped each.
That's $339.98 per 3TB of backup capacity, assuming you store one offsite in rotation, after startup costs. If you have 24TB to back up, this comes to:
$2767.84 total.
They make duo-versions of those drive docks for marginally more (and ones with eSATA and whatnot instead of USB3), so buy four of them and you'll have plenty of "slots". If you want, instead, you could usea an Addonics box (or something similar) with hot-swap drive bays for a few hundred bucks. It'd take a
huge amount of docks and/or a very fancy case to add up to $1095. You only need 8 to do 24TB in one fell swoop, and that's assuming the online array is completely fully. For example, four of the Thermaltake USB3 Duo-Drive docks comes to $260. That total would be $2979.84.
Turn the docks/case off when not-in use for a backup (once a week or something). You could even, maybe, automate this with a timer.
Nimbie:
Nimbie USB Plus: $1095
Taiyo Yuden BD-R ~$1.44/25GB
That's 40 discs per TB, times 3TB, times 2 for the offsite copy, which is $345.60 per TB. The total cost for 24TB would be:
$3859.80
Even if you could find marginally lower prices for the BD-R discs than I'm quoting (that was for packs of 300, which is more than he'd need), you're still looking at a
much higher overall cost because of the hardware cost. Plus, then you're stuck managing 120 discs (more than the Nimbie can handle) to backup 24TB just once. To deal with the fact that you're really going to need a Nimbie Chorus system ($2k+). And how do you do offsite backup? Buy another Nimbie system and switch them? Or do you painstakingly catalog and transfer them one at a time?
And then, how do you store them to make sure that data stays "good"? How do you check them? How do you update them? (My prices were for BD-Rs, so you're throwing them out and buying new each time you change a file.)
If you are in a massive data center that is going to buy discs by the tens of thousands and use a massive, multi-million dollar auto-loader and archival system? Sure. It is cheaper per TB to store backups that way. Slower and less convenient, but cheaper.
But it isn't cheaper for most normal humans, and it isn't cheaper for 24TB.
And it certainly isn't higher quality. That's just funny.