Can I use Blu-ray disks, specifically 25GB Verbatim BD-R LTH Type disks as long term storage / backup?
you can use them as backups, but not for too many years.
Is this a viable option, or am I missing something
it is a viable option... just keep in mind that bit rot can introduce errors over time, especially in burned media (since they are poor quality to begin with).
the solution is to either use par2 parity, or make more than 1 copy of everything. (aka, rolling backup).
Do these things just "go bad" after a period of time?
everything goes bad eventually, its entropy. with optical disks you should have quite a few errors after a few years, hence parity is recommended.
Things change sooo fast It's hard to keep up to the technology.
First release of optical media:
CD = 1982
DVD = 1996 (japan), 1997 (USA), 1998 (Europe), 1999 (Australia)
BluRay = 2003
I'm concerened with HDD Failure as long term storage.
As you should be, this is why we use backups and redundancy.
HDD are a little more reliable than optical media you burn yourself, and a lot less reliable then pressed optical media (factory made).
However, everything fails, you just need to have sufficient backups and redundancy not to lose data WHEN it happens. (not if, when)
Lots of digital photo's and graphic design files.
Doesn't matter what its for. Storage is storage and reliability remains the same.
*sigh* I just can't seem to part with the stuff =)
You shouldn't have to, storage is getting ever cheaper and more plentiful... so go ahead and indulge yourself by keeping all of it, forever.
The
http://dvdisaster.net/en/index.html DVDisaster project is a program that automatically handles making parity data for your disks and recovering data from them (can only recover data from disks that were burned with parity to begin with), it works with CDs, DVDs, and BDs... So you don't have to make par2 files yourself for everything before burning it, much easier to handle. It also provides protection against corruption of file table (which renders the whole disk unreadable... which happens alarmingly often unfortunately). it uses the same Reed-Solomon algorithm as parchive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed-Solomon_error_correction
BTW, you will notice it says on the download page "Binary for Windows: coming soon" for version 0.72.2. Don't get the 0.70 version (from 2008), instead click on "Show older releases in the 0.72 version branch" and then download the windows or macOS binary for version 0.72.1