Optical backup strategy for high resolution digital photos, need some help :)

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dlphelan

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Sep 24, 2009
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So, my wife is an avid amateur photographer and shoots in RAW, so I've got about 250GBs of photographs to backup. I recently purchased a bluray writer with the intent of creating a backup set of all her photographs and then burning new discs as we go along, adding to the backup set.

Her photoset resides on a 2TB hard drive on her computer and is kept mirrored both on an external hard drive and on the storage drive in my computer as well.

My question is, what's the best way to go about putting them on discs? Should I just fill each Blu-ray with photos?

I've heard that I should be using PAR files, but I think that maybe I'm just getting old or something, because I cannot make my brain figure out what I'm supposed to do.

Do I create a PAR file for each blu-ray disc burned to another disc? If this sounds like a stupid question, I'll admit that it probably is. For some reason I really need it spelled out for my because my brain is stuck.

Thanks!

David
 
What I would do is create a 20% PAR2 recovery set for each disc, and put a copy on the disc with the data, and put another copy (along with say the recovery sets for 4 other discs) on a seperate disc. That should give a reasonable amount of protection in the event of minor physical damage to the discs. You'll have to do some math to figure out how much data goes on each disc, while still allowing space for the recovery set.
 
The thing with that is, what if in 10 years you go back to the disc and you can't remember what the hell you did. If you just write the photos to the disc, its' as easy as reading them. If you really want redundancy then write two disc for each set of photo's.
 
This is just a backup and I will be migrating as storage mediums change, etc. So, I'm hoping not to get into a situation 10 years down the road and not know what's happened :)

Also, someone else made a good recommendation about making sure to put a copy of the par2 software on each disc (in several different formats) so you won't be scrambling to find software if you take the backup to a different computer.

David
 
if someone were to use want to use par2, what is the best way to go about doing it?

also just got a BR burner for my new rig and need to do some backups of files ad re-burns of previous BR disks i did 2 years ago..
 
Consider just buying a harddrive, copying them over, then sticking it in a sealed bag on the shelf? Harddrive should last just as long as any optical medium and SATA controllers should be accessible for at least another 10 years (if not 20).
 
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