Blu-Ray discs as archival format

Friends of mine have been touting Blu-Ray discs as quick, effective ways to archive media and old data. They say the dual-layer 50GB disc will maintain its integrity for 50 years.
Any opinions on that? Is this true?

there is a lot of talk over at dvxuser about this and some have mentioned about media degrading over 5 to 10 years with cd/dvd and wonder if blue ray will be any different.

speed of BR burners will also figure into their feasibility for archiving

Tough to say a format will last 50 years until...well...50 years passes.


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In the mid 1990's there was an independent lab that used to test for this kind of thing. Interestingly, they were quietly disbanded/closed and nothing replaced them. But before they did they had tested pretty much everything. Analog tape, optical film, DA88 stock, Digibeta stock, optical media (CD-R and DVD-R, which was very new at the time), MO, etc. Bottom line - and remember this was 10-12 years ago, I'm sure things have improved since then - was that the longevity of optical media was atrocious, 5-8 years I think it was. Optical film & analog audio & video tape was nominal (several decades, though it does steadily deteriorate pretty linearly). DA88 tape was the worst of all as I recall with serious issues arising after just 24-36 months ( I can attest to this in my day to day work). Of course formulations improves and I'm sure things are better, especially with optical disc formats. But how much better can they be? 10 times better? Maybe, but I doubt it. I'd love to use Blu-Ray to archive P2, but the rule still probably applies - copy & re-archive every 3-5 years. They're also too slow right now. Someone told me a ~50GB archive would take something like 8 hours in the real world. No workflow I can conceive of allows for this at the moment, so it's drive to drive copies & exercising the drives every few months for now.

Reid C

excellent response reid! ive edited it for legibility/digestibility:

In the mid 1990's there was an independent lab that used to test for this kind of thing. Interestingly, they were quietly disbanded/closed and nothing replaced them. But before they did they had tested pretty much everything.

Analog tape, optical film, DA88 stock, Digibeta stock, optical media (CD-R and DVD-R, which was very new at the time), MO, etc. Bottom line - and remember this was 10-12 years ago (I'm sure things have improved since then) was that the longevity of optical media was atrocious, 5-8 years I think it was.

Optical film & analog audio & video tape was nominal (several decades, though it does steadily deteriorate pretty linearly). DA88 tape was the worst of all as I recall with serious issues arising after just 24-36 months ( I can attest to this in my day to day work).

Of course formulations improve and I'm sure things are better, especially with optical disc formats. But how much better can they be? 10 times better? Maybe, but I doubt it.

I'd love to use Blu-Ray to archive P2, but the rule still probably applies - copy & re-archive every 3-5 years. They're also too slow right now. Someone told me a ~50GB archive would take something like 8 hours in the real world. No workflow I can conceive of allows for this at the moment, so it's drive to drive copies & exercising the drives every few months for now.

Reid C

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again reid - great response!

i hate to keep referencing dvxuser.com but ther eis a discussion over there about ways to "archive" p2 footage. and you hit the nail on the head. as far as "restore in place" goes, it seems you simply cant beat - [anually exercised] "drives on a shelf.

i believe properly stored black and white film (an optical sound neg is b/w) can last for up to 100 years.

however i can t us all jumping back to that in a hurry.

50 years for a disk (is Blu-Ray optical?)
i dont beleive it.

this is just a gut reaction,
but it seems to me that the more data you squeeze into a smaller space, the more susceptible to damage it must be.


nick

This would probably work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record

Travis
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A lot of people have gone sour on Blu-Ray. Mostly because it was originally thought of as being an upgrade from DVD. Install a new or second drive, buy the blank discs, and go. Use DVD for SD, Blu-Ray for HD, and have the added benefit of a good long-term storage solution for everything. Easy, right?

Not so as it turns out. There are still a lot of problems with Blu-Ray, including the rather absurd thoughts regarding licensing fees, and professional usage of Blu-Ray as a production and delivery format. That's not gonna happen. Not here anyway, and not with our current client base which, although initially interested, is already using other formats.

50 Years as a storage medium? How about 5? Regardless of the technical shelf-life of the discs, will there even be a Blu-Ray then is probably the real question to consider. There are other far better technologies like SSD that are catching up very quickly and which are poised to make all manner of optical discs and optical hard drives obsolete within the next few years. We just delivered a master as an image sequence on a 32GB compact flash card. That's where we're headed.

My 2 cents.
Clay

Don't mean to resurrect this thread but I just saw Nick Meyer's post above:

"i believe properly stored black and white film (an optical sound neg is b/w) can last for up to 100 years. however i can t us all jumping back to that in a hurry. "

Actually, this brings up an interesting point. There are 2 distinct archival issues: archiving of elements and archiving of the final product.

I've been involved in the audio archival & preservation side of things for years, and a few years ago I attended a general media archival conference here in Hollywood. The focus was archiving final product, audio & video, together & separately.

The discussion focused on final product. For picture, it was generally agreed by "the industry" that the best way to archive was, in fact, to output to film. Realizing that this was an expensive proposition even for large budget productions that originated on videotape, and that storage would be a problem especially for small production houses, there was a suggestion that the next best thing might be a frame-by-frame output to a high resolution, uncompressed, freely available, solid still graphics format. TIFF was suggested.

The idea was that by saving out to individual frames, the vagaries & deterioration of optical & magnetic storage would be avoided and the frames could be sewn back together in the future using basic graphics applications no matter what technologies were available at that point in time.

Reid C