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Comment by oconnore | Hacker News Reader

For personal archival I think Blu-ray is still best. I think of it as a supplement to S3 or Dropbox. Even if you end up re-writing discs it is very cheap per GB, and 25 or 50 GB discs are comfortable for “normal” personal sizes (my entire file set that I care to keep around is around 100 GB — mostly because I’m not careful about deleting old node_modules from ancient projects I’ve done)

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Note: there are 100GB bluray discs now that can be recorded using consumer burners. There are also M-Disc bluray discs which are specified to last about 1000 years (with some science and testing to back it up, even though no one tested it for 1000 real years obviously), because it uses a more hard "rock" layer to store the data instead of basically a color dye which is used on regular burnable discs (which last for 10 years according to some sources).

My photos/videos alone are over 300gb and growing.

node_modules is shit anyway, and shouldn't be duplicated for every single project.

How do you store and view this?

I have yet to find a good solution. My phone is crippled by the library and none of the Macs like it much either. I’d guess I was at 600gb.

Very good question.. I have most of it in directory folders "yyyy-mm-dd NAME OF THE EVENT" on dropbox, which I only sync on my macmini due to the amount of storage.

I'm trying to use icloud photos, because then I have them where they belong on my iPhone, but I just don't like the way it works. It's slow on my mac, but it's nice to have thumbnails locally, and originals available when needed. Althought that also doesn't work nicely when dragging. It's cool that photos groups things on event, but for me, I like to have my "camera roll", and manually make albums. That's possible, but it's ust easier to drag files around. Also, I'm looking for a solution to 'archive' photos (hide them, because I took 10 pictures of 1 thing).

There was a time I wanted to write an app/service for this. I might still do that if there's enough demand.

I also haven't figured out how to archive some video material. Recently I started shooting small clips, with the intention to make small 5 minute videos of my trips. As I don't want to delete the original material, I also need a place to store them, but I don't want to "browse" them.

I also have a few hundred GB of personal videos and photos and have historically managed backing up the collection on optical discs. Partitioning the backup by timeframes seems to work well for me, and tends to mirror the basic structure of historical photo albums. As disc density increased, my older CD's got grouped together on to new DVD tech, and DVDs now being grouped together on BDs. 300GB of data is 6 dual-layer BDs, or 3 100GB BD-R XL. To me storing a dozen or so discs as a backup for all my family's usual photos/home videos is not onerous. All of this is on top of storing this data "hot" on a storage array and various cloud services for normal browsing and usage so its not like we're constantly juggling these discs around. They tend to stay put tucked away with all the other important family heirloom kind of artifacts.

What's Blu-ray durability like with commodity drives?

To re-iterate my other comment, there are M-disc bluray discs now (up to 100GB per disc), which seem to last for 1000 years, if kept away from direct light and in good room conditions (low temperature and humidity).

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