Intro
The 1TB SSD hard drive on my MacBook Pro has gotten pretty much filled up. A big source of this problem are videos from my iPhone getting synced to Apple Photos. Having dogs and kids getting up to memorable things, and a quality iPhone at my finger tips, has lead to a steep increase in storage demands, and that looks only to continue to rise as time goes on. So I decided that I needed to externalize my collection of photos and videos that I’d been housing for years in Apples iPhotos/Photos app.
I am not willing to depend on iCloud partly for privacy concerns but even more because I dislike monthly subscriptions in general. So I had to figure out a new approach to maintaining and backing up my precious memories.
I’ve been in the habit of backing up my MacBookPro with an external USB HDD drive for a long time. On my new approach, I would move my Apple Photos app to a dedicated external drive, and thereby free up ~400 GB on my internal hard drive. This external drive is now the “SSOT” for my photos collection. When I backup my MacBookPro now, I have to also attach the drive for my photos as well, etc.
Archiving My Photos/Videos
I do not currently have a backup system that would prevent loss in the face of e.g. the house burning down. I plan to eventually get some synology drives set up at my home and at my relatives, but for now I wanted a disc-based archive solution that would let me store them in the attic and not have to worry about their degradation i.e. for ~10+ years. So I figured I’d look for a CD-like-disc solution.
A few google searches later and I conclude that “M-Disc” is the only game in town. As of Jan 2022, you can burn up to 100GB onto a single disc, and it will allegedly last for ~1000 years.
To my surprise though, detailed implementation of the technology was a bit ambiguous. It wasn’t clear to me what drive(s) would burn to m-disc. So I figured I would report my experience with the technology here in case it proves useful to others.
Obtaining a Drive to Burn M-Discs
If you put “m-disc external drive” into Amazon you’ll get a few dozen options. However, some of these options will use ambiguous terms like “m-disc ready”. Does that mean it is ready to write to M-Disc, or just read them?
Also, the letter combos BD, BD-R, BDXL, BD-R XL and BDXL-R will often get intertwined in such conversations. Be careful: BDXL means “Blueray Disc eXtra Large”, but that is not by itself what you need for archiving. Conventional CDs and Bluerays use a dye to encode their information, and this method will degrade on the order of decades. M-Disc uses a different medium for encoding information that prevents degradation indefinitely (1000 years + according to claimed estimates). So make sure that you get “100GB M-Disc BDXL” (e.g. here), and not just “100GB BDXL” (e.g. here). M-Disc discs will cost about x10 that of conventional discs.
And, of course, we want the maximum disc size, which is 100GB as of 2022. (Life is too short to be archiving with anything smaller.)
I ended up going with this drive and these discs for my initial experiment.
Burning to M-Disc on a MacBook Pro
Low-Quality Backup
My Apple Photos library measures ~400GB on the hard drive. I opened it, selected everything, and exported with the following “lowish-quality” settings:
- Photos
- JPEG quality: medium
- Size: small
- Videos
- Movie Quality: 480p
The resulting output files measured ~75GB, which would fit snuggly on a single 100GB M-disc.
I considered converting the .mov files to a more universal format before burning to disc, but since this is for archival backup, I figured I wouldn’t bother. (I.e. I’m betting that if I ever need this in the future, then there will still be a Mac machine in existence.)
To burn the disc on a Mac, I attached the external drive with the Micro-B-to-A USB cable it came with and a A-to-C USB adapter to my Mac and inserted a blank M-disc. At first it wasn’t clear how to open up the native software to burn the files, but I soon figured it out. Simply, you need to have a CD-drive mounted and then you can right click on the folder and it will give you an option to ‘Burn to Disc…’.
Also, if you have files scattered to different folders, then you can first create a new ‘burn’ directory in finder by going to File > New Burn Folder. Then copy all of the files you want to burn to this folder; this will just create aliases to the original files.
(NOTE: at first I tried dragging the ~20k files from my dir to the burn folder, but that proved tricky since the machine would require sometime to catch up; not wanting to sit there with my finger on the mousepad indefinitely, I decided it would be neater to use the terminal. However, using the `mv` command to move files to a burn folder does move them (without aliasing). See here.)
Again, when you are ready to burn and you have an external burn-capable cd-drive connected, just right-click on the burn folder and select “Burn to Disc…”. This will open a menu that looks like the following.
The menu did not allow me to select which drive to use to do the burning; I assume that if multiple drives had been attached, it would have made me specify which one.
I was given two burn speeds: 2x and 4x. I was not in a rush so selected 2x, but I have no reason to believe that burning faster would have significantly increased the possibility of something going wrong.
Also, note, the external drive has a 5V DC power barell input, but does not provide a corresponding power supply, and it was not clear to me if I would need one for this job.
The burning process took about 4 hours and I was immediately able to peruse and open the files on the M-disc on my Mac. So now I have everything on a single disc, but in low quality.
High-Quality Backup
Next, I wanted to create a high-quality backup of my 400GB.
First, I did a LOT of clean up of my album. If you are going to create a high quality backup then it pays to get thing in order. A lot of my photos from the period ~2000-~2014 had lots of duplicates due to the evolution of the iPhotos/Photos software, my many migrations and machinery updates as well as my habits.
(Note: There are several free apps on the Apple App store that let you remove duplicate photos. However, I havent found a free one yet that also helps you remove videos!)
Once ready to petrify your Photos collection, I selected everything in my Photos Library and exported it as “Unmodified Original” with options “File Name: Use File Name” and “Subfolder Format: Moment Name” to my the external hard drive, producing a folder with ~320GB of subfolders of data. The subfolders each have a date, but the alphabetic ordering of Apple finder does not correspond to time ordering, so I first had to write a script to rename all folders from “Place Name, Month DD, YYYY” to “YYYY-MM-DD-Place_Name”.
Next, I had to write another script to move these folders into separate folders increasing chronologic order of ~99GB, ~99GB, 99GB and ~24GB in order to know what to burn onto non-so-inexpensive 3x100GB and 1x25GB M-discs.
The rest was similar to low-quality backup onto a single disc, with some careful labelling 🙂
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