Neil, thanks for your insights. As I’ve gone back down the rabbit hole of archive and storage I’ve been reminded that storage and archiving cannot be all three of cheap, easy, quick.
We have 200 LTO-5 tapes backed up through Retrospect and probably 200-300 LaCie Rugged desktop drives. Fortunately we’re still able to recover using Retrospect and the LaCie drives have been holding up. Our company needs to make decisions regarding footage for defunct clients. I don’t think they’re going to want to spend the money to transfer it to new storage; there’s no contracts I know of that we would save their footage indefinitely.
I like the idea of an SSD hot storage, 180TB Nearline, then LTO 9 autoloader/library now that LTO capacity has reached 18TB per tape. Realizing we’re either paying to migrate in the future, or paying yearly to use the cloud providers.
If money was no object I’d go with AWS glacier deep in US West and Google archive in US Central since Google can rehydrate in seconds.
What are you using for software to do storage tiering?