how good is the data reliability with BD-R (Blu-Ray)

[ethan at 757.org]

My BD-R story:

For a little bit I was trying to go Blue Ray for backup of conference 
talks I was recording at the time. I picked up a Samsung BD-R drive and 
some memorex media. The media for BD-R comes in a High to low and low to 
high versions. One is dye based not for long term, the other type is long 
term. The Memorex type I got was the long term type.

I carefully made 2 or 3 copies of each set of video files. Each event took 
2 to 3 discs (Was recording events live using Blackmagic ATEM system, 5GB 
per hour is the data rate in 1080i60 h264 encoded.)

After about 9 months I went to copy some data back. It was all gone. 
Everything deteriorated and all the data was unreadable. Before I bought 
the drive I looked for info on reliability and didn't find any indicators 
that the media sometimes has severe issues.

Since then I kind of swore off optical media. I have some Verbatim discs 
but I haven't used them yet. I figure they will do better, but still 
bitter over losing the information from the earier events.

I have around 60TB of spinning disks at home, but will be going tape in 
the future.

A lot of my data is conference video and backups of laser show tapes which 
often are 8 channels of WAV data @ 48khz, so ~3-4GB per 30 minute show 
tape.