Good point. Which is why I use cases for mine when storing them... Not completely safe but if dropped the case absorbs most of the shock. Hence, I do not ever drop them

I use this method as well. But optical's get tedious when you have stuff that exceeds the 46.6GB limit so the really big stuff remains on the HDD. I should add if one does use optical media - get your media from somewhere other than cram-a-zon, and make certain that it's decent media. Also the use of crc's with optical is essential to make certain that what you stared with is what was written to the disc.

 

There's a lot to say about backups depending on how critical data we're talking about, but whatever the method and the medium there's one simple truth:

Unless a backup is regularly tested it isn't a backup at all.

 

The safest way for backing up data is to burn it to discs.
The life span of BluRay discs is at about 50-100 years and you can get writable blanks with up to 128GB (quad layer BDXL).
I'm backing up the important stuff that way since ages. My data from when I was a teen is still intact on a stack of burned
DVDRW's in my basement while over the years a lot of flash drives & hdd's said good bye.

 

Never ever used any BDs, but I've got hundreds of CDRs and DVDRs that are completely unreadable after 10-20 years, HDDs are mostly OK, SSDs are mostly OK ONLY if powered regularly, otherwise dead after 1-2 years.

 

Hello @Myfanwy, in German museums, Blu-ray discs containing cultural treasures are copied and burned again according to a fixed schedule, essentially creating a copy of the copy.

I once spent two days copying all my old CDs and DVDs to a hard drive because it makes searching for files easier and saves the old data. Five CDs and DVDs became unreadable, which was annoying, but that's normal wear and tear.

That's why I switched to Blu-ray from Verbatim. It's a lot of work and costs a lot of money, and the burners only last about five years, depending on usage. I keep all the discs in paper sleeves that I've labeled. Searching is very time-consuming, though; if I need something old, I have to search through every sleeve. I have a whole box of burned treasures.

The trick is to back up important data to three different storage media and keep them at roughly the same temperature. Sunlight is the enemy of every disc. @Myfanwy, some CDs are of such poor quality that they disintegrate, some have scratches, and sometimes the drive doesn't read all the files. SSDs should be connected twice a year.

Microsoft Research Project Silica Team - Laser writing in Glass... --> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-10042-w

 

Making generalised statements about how NAND storage WILL fail after remaining unpowered for 1/2 years is just repeating tweaker forum myths.

JEDEC (JESD218) mandates absolute minimum data retention durations manufacturers must meet for unpowered NAND for certification. "Power on every X months" printed on the box is the same as "best before" on food; rock bottom numbers to cover legal bases.

When was the last time your SSD died the moment you crossed its advertised TBW threshold?
When was the last time someone ended up in the ICU because they ate chocolate one day after its Best Before?

The data on my microSD cards (SLC) has happily survived FIFTEEN years unpowered, long forgotten in a drawer/phone.

I've eaten several packs of dried fruit (still factory sealed) 10-12 years after their best before, stored at room temperature. Taste/texture difference to brand new packs? N O N E.

Over the course of autumn & winter 2025, I used up several packs of butter & margarine that had expired in late 2024/early 2025, also stored at room temp. I removed the top layer for safety. After that, no difference in taste/texture to brand new products.

For this post, I dug up my Samsung 830 (MLC), unpowered since 2014. Excuse the dust, fresh out the drawer.



Looks like 11 years without power did nothing to our data.

Granted, I'd be nervous to do this with a QLC drive, but I'm reasonably confident TLC drives can go for a decade without power.

I'm so done with the constant parroting of tweaker claims on these forums. Keep waffling, I'm out.

 

Last edited: Mar 4, 2026 at 10:22 AM

Anyone who wants to know the details should read this article:

Source: Datenhaltbarkeit auf SSDs und Flash-Speicher
https://www.speicherguide.de/wissen...arkeit-auf-ssds-und-flash-speicher-21128.html

Translated: Data retention on SSDs and flash memory
https://www-speicherguide-de.transl...l=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=de&_x_tr_pto=wapp

Almost all manufacturers now specify the lifespan of their SSDs as between 1.5 and 2 million hours, combined with 50 to 75 times the storage capacity. In practical terms, this means the drive will last between 170 and 230 years and can be fully written between 50 and 75 times during that time. For a 500 GB SSD, this translates to a total write capacity of between 25 and 37.5 TB, or between 300 and 600 MB per day during the specified operating time. Of course, this can be increased depending on the shortened usage period.

Therefore, if the SSD is used for only five years instead of 170 or even 230, between 10.2 and 27.6 GB can be written per day. This would then be the limit of its logical endurance. Whether these values are sufficient for individual applications must be determined by each user based on the data they change daily.

Therefore, if you plan to use SSDs as an archive medium, you should definitely put the medium under power every year, or at the latest every two years, check it completely and thus "touch" every cell.

 

with music CDs this will not be an issue, but with some other, smaller data my personal problem with BD discs is that they are quite slow to mount, as some 50,000 files can be on it. my "solution" for that is to create some toast files ( think "DVD images") and only burn those 5-10 "DVD" onto the BD.
whenever you will not need to mount all of those images together anyway, you can make your life a lot easier. where you have to mount everything, it will still be faster.

i would kill for a BD-QL-RAM media format, but i guess you cannot have everything.

 

2 bays Synology NAS in RAID 1
Second hand for a good price
Activate "data scrubbing" set to 3 months or 1 month

It should be affordable and effective

 

I would avoid any fully external drive since they can get issues where your computer does not see them anymore.. I've had this problem often. It is better to buy an internal drive and put it in an external closure becasue if it fails to connect, you can change the closure or even if needed connect it internally to retrieve the data. Internally is hardly happens in this same matter that the HD internally still functions, but that there are connection problems. It's mostly an USB thing, not as much sata.
I prefer backing up on emterprise drives like ultrastar (WD) or hitachi drives. Second hand so its cheap (not too many hours) and use a few of them. I find enterprise drives with the lowest failrates (accorording to backblaze) are much better than a lot of new ones likes WD green and shit like that, that just breaks when you use it a few months. that quality is pathetic. In general I find high quality second hand things like PC's are much better than the cheap current models in generals. They always seem to fail .I ahve this laptop that we once bought for watching netflix ages ago and because it just had to function as a player for nextflix we bought a cheap i3 one, and it's so slow with booting and opening up explorer even takes like 3 seconds. It's such a pain to even function in the most basic way.

 

while i agree with your statement, it does not match the task.

you do not make backups from backups only when it is absolutely sure that 3 hours later it will be unreadable, you do this as soon as there is a very little chance that it does not.

mind you, it is called safety backup, not lucky backup.

if you power on your SSDs ever christmas you can be sure that they will remain intact.
if you wait 12 years because you read somewhere that they can also survive 12 years you might miscalculate and end up trying it after 13 years, or forgetting about them completely.

the DVD friends here should also copy their data asap.
unlike CDs or BDs, DVD really sucks for archival and might fail after 10-20 years even when stored properly (no sun ect.) DVD is the only thing which failed on me several times, and DL seems to be especially problematic (which i did not expect)

 

Most users have passwords like "Love" or "123456" and have never even heard of the term "backup."
People who understand backups have their data backed up multiple times; some even rent a safe or a safety deposit box.

Anything can happen: floods, earthquakes, fires, burglaries, hardware failures.
And ultimately, we can't rule out the possibility that aliens might steal our data!

 

Maybe have a look at the estimated lifespan of BDs (specifically DL/TL):
https://web.archive.org/web/http://www.mcmedia.co.jp/enterprise/pdf/LifeTestSummaryVer1.pdf

Who wrote this and why?

 

The editor of the online magazine wrote it to inform interested readers.