Best archiving solutions

[Herb Sevush]

Cache-A is a complete appliance with it’s own hard drive. It is highly recommended by everyone who uses it but it is a lot more than just an LTO drive. That’s like saying your looking for a hard drive and since an HPZ820 costs 6K then that’s too expensive for a hard drive. An LTO drive costs around 4K, which still might be too much for you, but that’s what they cost. Against that you have to weigh the cost of loosing your archive because of the increased chances your optical media simply won’t open.

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

[Tom Daigon]

Thanks Herb. Thats good to know. My research into that technology hasnt been extensive. So farmy projects dont need a long shelf life. And Ive read reports the Blu ray disks fair better over time then CDs or DVDs.
I guess time will tell. FWIW I have Blu rays from 7 years ago that still play fine 😀

PS My Z820 was $14,000 before the $4,000 discount 🙂

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]

[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. :D”

I looked at Cache-A, too. Very cool, but it was too much money for some features I didn’t really.

I chose to go with a TOLIS Group hardware bundle. You can get LTO-5 for around $4k, or LTO-6 for just under $5k. Unlike the Cache-A, this is not a self-contained appliance, so you would need a computer to attach it to. I’ve got mine attached to a Mac Pro.

Did it cost me a lot of money? Yes. Did it take a lot of my time to archive all my old projects from the collections of hard drives around my office onto tape? Yes. Was it worth it the first time a client wanted to pull some old assets from a project I did for them four years ago? Yes. Do I feel better knowing a fire at my office won’t erase my entire business and production history because I’ve got tapes at home? Yes.

I do wish you the best of luck with the BD-Rs, but it’s not a risk I’m willing to take and I wouldn’t suggest it as an archival strategy unless you can tolerate the big risk of losing your data after a few years.

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

[Walter Soyka]

[Tom Daigon] “PS My Z820 was $14,000 before the $4,000 discount :-)”

Perfect! You can buy a tape drive with the money you saved! 🙂

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

[Tom Daigon]

[Walter Soyka] ” unless you can tolerate the big risk of losing your data after a few years.”

I think thats speculation . As I said above, I have 7 year old Blu ray disks that still play great. I think reports of their early demise have been greatly overstated (to steal and butcher a phrase from Mark Twain). 😀

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]

[Tom Daigon] “I think thats speculation . As I said above, I have 7 year old Blu ray disks that still play great. I think reports of their early demise have been greatly overstated (to steal and butcher a phrase from Mark Twain). :D”

Fair — I am speculating.

And also to your point, BD-R’s phase change technology is supposed to have much, much better longevity than CD-R/DVD-R’s dye technologies (though as always, it seems that disc quality varies quite a bit by grade and manufacturer).

I am not saying that anything burned to optical is doomed for bit rot in under three years — nor am I saying that tape guarantees 30 years of flawless recovery. It’s certainly possible that I’ll suffer a tape failure five years from now while your BD-R works fine, or vice versa.

I’m just saying that BD-R’s different physical structure notwithstanding, burned optical’s history in longevity is poor compared to tape.

Also, one copy of data is way to close to zero copies of data.

Maybe I’ll start a BD-R archive in addition to my 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

[Tom Daigon]

[Walter Soyka] “Maybe I’ll start a BD-R archive in addition to my LTO-5…”

And I will check out what LTO-5 has to offer at NAB. Maybe theres a price drop since LTO-6 is being promoted 😀

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

[Marcus Lyall]

LTO5 and Presstore.

If you can afford the multichanger LTO5, then get this. Huge timesaver. But expensive.
The big problem with archiving is having to change the media.
Nothing better than going home for the weekend and finding that the whole 10tb has archived itself.
Nothing more boring than forgetting to put the next tape/disk in morning, noon and night.

We tried Retrospect, Bru and Presstore.
Presstore is expensive but by the far the best.
Bru is great if you like Terminal. (or was when we were using it).

The thing about backup software is to buy the right one first time.
Otherwise you back everything you have up, then realise the software is crap, and have to do it all again with the next one.

Other good thing about the multichanger is that you can schedule a nightly backup and stick 10 tapes in. Then you don’t get the situation where you thought the backup was running but the tape was full.

That can get expensive too.

[Charo Sanchez]

LTO is the standard for long term media archiving. It provides very reliable storage with a 30-year cartridge lifetime. LTFS solves the interchangeability problem. LTFS provides LTO interchangeability between archive systems that support LTFS.

If you want a cost-effective solution, check out XenData Workstation archives -or feel free to contact me directly. Our Windows 7 workstation solution can manage a large offline LTO tape archive and is extremely easy to use.

Charo Sanchez
csanchez@xendata.com
https://www.xendata.com