Best archiving solutions

[Michael Hendrix]

We back up to LTO-5. The drives are expensive but the media is fairly cheap. I think a terabyte backup is around $10.

[Herb Sevush]

[Tim Boknecht] “I’m thinking a large external drive committed as a backup would be a more cost effective and time effective solution, but is there a better alternative?”

If your looking to hold on to this material for 1-2 years, an external hard drive is your best bang for the buck. Longer term than that your running an increasingly larger risk of drive failure and data loss. LTO 5 drives cost about $3500-$4000 but the media is fairly cheap, about $10/Terrabyte. The media is as safe as video tape and, depending on your setup, reasonably quick to retrieve, although not as fast as a hard drive. Safest long term storage is on the cloud, where costs keep decreasing while speed keeps increasing, but for now it’s still relatively expensive and slow.

The cow has an “Archiving and Backup” forum that you might find very helpful.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Tom Daigon]

I like blu ray dvds for data storage. Faster then tape and most PCS have a drive.

Tom Daigon
PrP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxPrG3WUyz8
(Best viewed at 1080P and full screen)
HP Z820 Dual 2687
64GB ram
Dulce DQg2 16TB raid

[Walter Soyka]

I respectfully disagree with Tom.

LTO-5 is very fast — it’s actually faster than most people’s hard drives. The maximum data transfer rate is 140 MB/s. I’m writing an archive now that’s averaging about 130 MB/s. By contrast, my back-of-the-napkin math says that Blu-Ray writing at 12x maxes out at 54 MB/s.

I am also pretty uncomfortable with the longevity of writable optical media. I have seen too many not-that-old CD-Rs and DVD-Rs fail to read to have a lot of faith in BD-R. Tape is not perfect, but it’s built for archival use.

My personal backup/archive strategy is a paranoid mix of multiple RAIDs (two online, one nearline), cloud (via BackBlaze) and tape (2 copies each, BRU PE on LTO-5).

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Kevin Monahan]

As someone who used to be in charge of backup for a large broadcast facility: LTO is the way to do.

Kevin Monahan
Sr. Content and Community Lead
Adobe After Effects
Adobe Premiere Pro
Adobe Systems, Inc.
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[Mel Matsuoka]

I respectfully agree with Walter 🙂

Archiving important data on self-burned optical discs is a very bad idea. They’re okay for short-term archiving, but if you expect to restore that data in 5+ years without any errors, don’t count on it.

I love to tell my story about the time I spent a whole weekend transferring my old CD/DVD-R “archive” discs to an external hard drive, and discovering that nearly 30% of the discs would simply not read anymore, despite being in physically flawless condition. Many of these discs weren’t much older than 4-5 years. too.

LTO tape is designed for mission-critical archiving and backup, and is well worth the initial investment in the tape drive. Backwards compatibility with prior tape generations (up to two generations prior to whatever your current drive is capable of) is part of the LTO spec, so it’s reasonably future-proof. There is a good reason why banks and hospitals use LTO, and if they’re good enough for those types of applications, then it’s definitely good enough for archiving my clients TV commercials.

Regarding the speed of LTO, I’d agree that relying on tape alone for both archival and backup isn’t very practical if you find yourself constantly pulling old projects out of the archives for client modifications. For this reason, I use a hybrid tape/harddrive archival system. I archive the same data to both a “bare” hard-drive (using something like an eSATA/FW800 hard-drive dock like the Voyager Q), as well as an LTO5 cartridge.

When both sets of data are backed up, I take the LTO tape offsite and keep it at home, in case my office burns down or is vandalized by zombies. I keep the bare-drive archives on-site (storing them in anti-static boxes, like these ones from Wiebetech), so that when I need to quickly access old project files, I can mount them in a drive-dock and use them as a quasi-“near line” archive source.

This method works very well for me, as it strikes the perfect balance between speed, economy, redundancy and longevity.

Whatever archive system you implement, in my hard-learned opinion (In 2007 I lost a “backup” drive containing 2 years and over $100,000 worth of client projects), it’s more important to concern yourself with redundancy instead of which actual method you use to actually archive your data. For example, if you go with Tom’s BluRay method, you need to make–at a bare minimum–two verified, physical copies of each disc, and preferably keep them in different physical locations. If you only archive to external harddrives, then buy at least two harddrives––one for each redundant set of data.

[Chris Tompkins]

We back it all up to redundant hard drives, (USB) put em on the shelf, spin em up every 6 months.

All non-video files back up to the cloud as well.

Chris

[Tim Boknecht]

Thanks to all for your answers!

Chris, why do you spin them up your externals every so often? The context leads me to believe this is important somehow…

Tim Boknecht
Media Producer
Bravo Productions

[Chris Tompkins]

Hard drives can freeze up from inactivity, dry rot or bit rot,
Google it.

Chris

[Tom Daigon]

Out of curiosity I checked out some LTO 6 systems. This is a company I checked out last NAB.

https://www.cache-a.com/productspro.php

At a $10,000 prices point I will continues to use Blu ray disks. 😀

Tom Daigon
PrP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxPrG3WUyz8
(Best viewed at 1080P and full screen)
HP Z820 Dual 2687
64GB ram
Dulce DQg2 16TB raid