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What do you do when 24tb just isn’t enough?
When I bought my RAID, I never imagined I’d fill it. Now we’re starting to look like that’ll happen by the end of this political season. I’m just trying to figure out what a cost effective way to save stuff that I’ll *probably* never need again – but you never know. In the past we’d have the footage on tape so we could always get the tapes out of storage. Then we would burn blu-rays after tapes became passe, but at 50gb per disc that will be a ridiculous amount of discs. If I bought 1TB hard drives and put them on a shelf there is no guarantee that 5 years from now they’ll still boot up properly. This can’t be a new problem, what is everyone doing?
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5 Replies
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LTO tape backup/archive
David Roth Weiss
ProMax Systems
Burbank
DRW@ProMax.comSales | Integration | Support
David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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simple solution.
Buy more storage.
Everyone does it – and so should you.Bob Zelin
Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com -
Hdds in general is designed for constant power on and spinning environment. Not off-line archive. This costs in power usage. You’ll be paying a considerable amount for utility bill per month and to me it’s a waste of resource when the media is not being actively used. LTO-6 is really your only viable solution now for archival use. Blu-ray is OK, but just have not proven in long-term use yet. And at a paltry 50 Gb/disc, it’s too small and cumbersome to archive Tb-Pt scale Just last year each tape is $90. Now it’s $50. Very attractive price for 2.5 Tb/tape. Putting a hdd offline in cold storage (no power applied) is a 50/50 chance. Next few years that data may be long forever lost when the lubricant in the head dried up. Of course you can backup two drives. But this costs so much and LTO-6 is looking very attractive overall.
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LTO-6 for long term definitely.
But if you must have the data more accessible, then getting one of those 4-bay or 5-bay enclosures with tool-free or tray less drive install, and which can do JBOD is a good choice. You can place 5 bare drives in it, all connected via USB3. And simply power it once a day to keep the drives spinning and healthy.———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India -
I do the raw hard drive method as backup. LTO would be nice, but we just generate too much data in a year that it would be a hassle. LTO tape is always lagging pretty far behind hard drives in capacity.
I’d have to juggle 8 tapes a year. We also need fast access to offline material. A 4TB server volume gets 2 4TB drives. A synchronization script is run nightly (or nearly nightly) One drive is always stored offsite. After 5-8 years they are copied onto new drives (which hold more capacity, so I can combine about 5-8 onto 1 drive) So as time goes by, I have fewer drives.
If you go with LTO tape, I’d recommend a second hard drive backup as it is dirt cheap and you’d have fast access.
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