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For onsite backups, is it a valid option to buy a spindle of blu-ray discs and swap away until you have another copy of everything with enough par files included to account for a few years of bit rot?

Or is copying everything to a new, larger hard drive every year and keeping a few years of drives still the best choice?

Edit: for personal use, for sure! I think BD-R goes up to 100GB.

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With the generally available rewriteable blu-ray capacity, doing this would be quite burdensome to archive even some couple terabytes. Would recommend multiple online harddrives, preferably far apart from each other and some append-only mode to prevent accidental deletion. Or a cheap online-backup service, or both.

That's essentially a more expensive (manpower-wise) and less reliable alternative to tapes.

Keep in mind that what might be considered 'a lot of data' varies significantly. A medium commercial company here in west EU is going to require about 0.5PB of backup space for a single data rotation. In other areas you might get away with storing 100TB or even less.

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