In a recent Youtube video by Rick Beato he showed all computer and audio recording and playback equipment he has accumulated over the many years he worked as an audio professional. He sang the praises of physical formats and owning music and there are many points that I 100% agree with. He also showed a Blu-Ray Drive and a particular kind of Blu-rays I wasn’t aware of which he is using for long term archival and backup purposes.
Because I know that he is working on macOS I felt somewhat safe to assume that this had to be compatible with macOS and so I immediately went to one of my default computer store websites to check if they had the drive and Blu-rays in stock. They did and it was pretty much the only thing they had on offer.
Why, though?
Ah – good question! For me personally it is about the diversification of backups. Most of my data is stored on HDDs and SSDs, locally or “in the cloud” and there is an appeal to me to physically write essential data, protect it from modification and have it on a different medium with very different volatility properties than a SSD.
Of course, the question would be if there is a Blu-ray reader in 25 years that I could realistically use? Maybe. What the video by Rick Beato showed me that you can hold onto core technology even if it is horrendously outdated. I still have my first computer from 1996 and it is still booting up.
Ultimately I don’t think this is something everyone needs to do. It is a bit of a nerdy playground kind of a deal that is not entirely implausible to have some benefit down the road.
The Gear
The Blu-ray drive is the ASUS BW-16D1X-U and it works out of the box on macOS 26.6.2 without any extra software.
The Blu-ray medium is the Verbatim M Disc – which is a write-once, read-many disc that supposedly has a very long lifetime. Initial claims were 1000+ years.
a) that is hard to verify and b) I’m perfectly fine if they last 50 years which I think is plausible given the fact that I have 20+ years old CD-Rs which are still readable. (Check the wikipedia section on M-Disc durability)
The Software
The good news is that macOS (tested on 26.6.2) comes with everything you need. I was dreading having to install some crappy software just to burn some data on a Blu-ray and there are some reports that burning 100GB discs via the Finder does not work properly but I did everything via the command line / terminal and it worked fine.
- drutil (check drive and media status)
- hdiutil (create, burn, verify images)
How to
1. Check drive status
Once the drive is connected you can check whether macOS recognizes it. With a blank disc inserted you will also get some media info:
drutil status
Vendor Product Rev
ASUS BW-16D1X-U A105
Type: BD-R Name: /dev/disk10
Write Speeds: 2x, 4x
Overwritable: 10861:54:42 blocks: 48878592 / 100.10GB / 93.23GiB
Space Free: 10861:54:42 blocks: 48878592 / 100.10GB / 93.23GiB
Space Used: 00:00:00 blocks: 0 / 0.00MB / 0.00MiB
Writability: appendable, blank, overwritable
Media ID: VERBAT IMkYou can also check whether hdiutil recognizes the drive via:
hdiutil burn -list
ASUS BW-16D1X-U via USB (DRDeviceSupportLevelUnsupported)2. Prepare files
Now create a folder and put the files and folders you want to burn onto the disc in that folder. Be aware that you cannot write the full 100GB because of extra metadata that needs to be written alongside your data. From what I could find on the Internet you should aim for 90-95GB max.
3. Create image
When you have compiled the files and folders you can create a burnable image with this command:
hdiutil makehybrid \
-udf \
-udf-version 1.50 \
-o ~/tmp/my_blu_ray.udf.dmg \
~/path/to/source/folder/
Creating hybrid image...Note: the name of the source folder will become the name of the disc.
4. Verify the image and size
This step is optional but is a good moment to verify your image is not exceeding the 90-95GB size limit
hdiutil imageinfo /tmp/my_blu_ray.udf.dmg
Class Name: CRawDiskImage
Size Information:
Total Bytes: 79623483392
Compressed Ratio: 1
Sector Count: 155514616
Total Non-Empty Bytes: 79623483392
Compressed Bytes: 79623483392
Total Empty Bytes: 0
Checksum Type: none
Format: UDTO
partitions:
partition-scheme: none
block-size: 512
appendable: false
partitions:
0:
partition-name: whole disk
partition-start: 0
partition-synthesized: true
partition-length: 155514616
partition-hint: UDF
partition-filesystems:
UDF: Media
burnable: true
Format Description: raw read/write
…5. Burn and verify the disc
The last step is burning the image to disc which is done with this simple command
hdiutil burn -verifyburn /tmp/my_blu_ray.udf.dmg
Preparing data for burn
Opening session
Opening track
Writing track
.............And thats it.
Final words
So far I’ve managed to burn close to 80GB to disc which indicates that macOS is capable of burning 100GB M-Disc Blu-rays – at least via command line and with this particular drive. The 25GB M-Discs also worked flawlessly with the same method.
The 100Gb took ~2.5h to burn and verify.
If you have any additional tips on tools / commands for burning Blu-rays on macOS, let me know!
Overall I’m quite disappointed with direction computing technology is developing and there seems to be the overarching agenda of making people not own their data nor their computers or other related products. Most recent example would be SmartTVs which have gotten rather cheap because the manufacturers are selling your privacy to ad companies.
All the streaming services make you not own copies of music or movies, they can be changed (ie. remastered or edited) or in the worst case deleted from the cloud.
I am definitely more motivated to own and self host my digital life where feasible. Don’t rely on other peoples / companies computers to keep your photos, documents and other important digital data. Make backups and don’t keep them in just one physical location. I’m planning to have 3-4 Blu-rays with core essential data which I never want to lose and I plan to give a set each to 1-2 close friends – with the most personal stuff obviously password protected/encrypted.
What are your strategies for coping with the IT landscape of the 21st century?