Lots and lots of hard drives

[Rich Rubasch]

Bob’s right again. And by the way, I have a working Sony 1″ machine!

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media Inc.
Video Production, Post, Studio Sound Stage
Founder/President/Editor/Designer/Animator
https://www.tiltmedia.com

[Walter Soyka]

I agree with Bob that data migration is the problem with all archival, and that this gets laborious. I’d add that your data’s importance should be reflected in your budget. For us, the value of our data drops a lot after a few years, so maintenance is not a big deal after a while.

As for storing old data on RAIDs, I believe in tiered storage. We have online storage (active projects), nearline storage (as many recent projects as we can fit), and offline storage (tape). Ultimately, I can add offline tape capacity a lot more practically than I can add nearline spinning rust capacity, but it does take labor to do it. (Though if I were less cheap, a robot would make this a lot easier.)

Personally, I find the idea of using the original hard drives as the off-site backup terrifying. I know some folks do regularly scheduled spin-ups of their “archival” hard drives in an effort to keep the lubricants from failing. Perhaps if you go this route, you’d consider something similar.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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