 Hi guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rossell here back to talk about one of my favorite topics which is backup and data protection and specifically using the M-disk an unusual option for those looking to Do their backup entirely physically not using the cloud And using optical media. So there are still people who are interested in this technology I think it's fascinating tech the M-disk as I mentioned before it's available in 250 and 100 gigabyte Discs it's available for DVD and for Blu-ray, although I think these days really it's only the DVD Sorry, the Blu-ray is that are gonna be of interest to people So I've been using the M-disk and an M-disk burner to back up three years worth of video content It was a massive massive pain, but I got there and I now have a binder full of M-disk But we all know of course if you're a backup fiend, you know that that even that Much effort is not enough because a proper backup approach Three two one necessitates that you're gonna have an off-site copy of your backup as well as an offs as well as an On-site copy because what happens if I have my wonderful M-disk video library and the house burns down or the house is flooded or Someone throws out for some reason my library thinking it's a DVDs from the 1990s So there you go. So that's why you need off-site in your backup approach now what I've done here using the wonderful draw.io software is I've gone ahead and Plotted out a few ways that you could do off-site and this is actually what I'm intending to do I'm visiting the US this summer and I'm going to be actually Creating a little off-site archive Bringing it with me physically in my luggage and leaving it there And I might do this process once a year for the here on after so here's a few ways I've thought about that you can if you wanted to do something like this you could So one way of doing a make this process a little bit easier if you wanted to burn So we're gonna need to burn two copies of our data. So I'm burning 20 gigs of video data at a time You might be burning photos whatever the case may be. It's not really important What type of data right now? I have not been able to find on the Marcus a burner with two tiers In other words, it's gonna have you're gonna be able to burn two m-discs Simultaneously, so I asked people who are also into the optical archival game and they said well what you can just do is buy two Burners two individual burners and hook them up to your computer at the same time and burn away So burners are not that expensive. They're about a hundred dollars these days for a m-disc capable blu-ray burner So if you're using a bunch of Linux It's very easy apparently with windows you might have more issues running the same Software it's simultaneously, but as I'm using Linux. So that would basically I just hook up to External blu-ray drives to my computer load into m-discs open the program twice and Burn at the same time and they should take about the same amount of time Now we all know burning optical media However great it is it's a bit of a pain in the ass So this is just one way I can think of to try make that process a bit easier Physically buying two burners Okay, so that's workflow one burn simultaneously was two m-disc burners workflow two is I have a typo here burn and then duplicate So this is what I would love to be doing now if I could find a 220 volt Blu-ray duplicator because I have 16 discs and I really don't want to load them one by one Copy and paste the data which is going to take about 30 minutes per disc Then burn each disc again, which is going to take about 30 to 40 minutes per disc going to be a royal Pita, so here is another way that you could do it So you've burned your on-site copies and you're filling up your archive whatever and what you could do to save yourself a bit of pain is Offline duplication and then move those discs over to your off-site location So what I'm talking about here. You might see this funny looking device these guys exist Unfortunately, they're becoming a rarer breed for instance this Plex copier one-to-one Blu-ray M-disc Duplicator copier tower these guys like you know when you see these things for hard drives nowadays. They're still very much used They can work fully offline. This one is done is made by the company called Plex copier You know given that this this market pretty small You're gonna see the same brands popping up again and again Double-click image to zoom in so that's what it is You can see it's a it's a you can you've got one drive here one drive here stick in your source and disc If you ever used a offline copier They're pretty and pretty intuitive and you just say please copy my M disc and you can go away and do something more fun This guy is $360 if Plex copier wish to send me a free M disc burner I will say thank you very much Plex copier, but until until that never happens. I'm probably going to be doing this Here's the third option and I call it sequential M disc burning or burn validate burn So you want to burn your firstly your your onsite copy? And then you burn your off-site copy And the only reason to do it in this painful way is that you do get a chance to verify the burner was successful Check it out a bit then burn the off-site And you can do this one at a time because what I actually do is I delete the data on my NAS after I do this Which in retrospect maybe wasn't a brilliant idea But if you don't want to do that you can keep the data there and then you know do this two-part process Do this, you know a few months apart So anyway, those are a few methods that you can use M disc for a three to one compliant backup approach How would you get your onto your off-site copies to your off-site location? You could do what I'm planning on doing stick them in a suitcase. You could post them one by one You could use the mail and post them to like a backup buddy in your backup buddy post you his M discs You could drive them to a you could drive them to your office You know wherever you have an off-site that's geographically separate from your onsite However, you can get from a to b or wherever you want to get from a to b should theoretically work and just keep an M disc Library there and between once you've got your two copies your onsite and your off-site You know that you're pretty golden from a data protection Standpoint you can do 10 or 20 copies, but diminishing returns really sets in from a risk standpoint after two Once you've got onsite and off-site you're pretty much set You don't need to create four different off-sites and scatter them on different continents Although you could if you really wanted to hope this video was useful Thank you guys for watching M disc fanatics of YouTube and more videos coming soon from myself