Jim Alfredson Posted February 23, 2010 Report Share Posted February 23, 2010 I've been having a rather frustrating few weeks or so dealing with computers. As Randy will attest, it started with trying to fix his sister's PC. I won't go into gory details, but let's just say it was beyond my ability to fix. The other night one of my partitions went down on a drive in my music machine (DAW). Using a data recovery program, I can get the data back... that's not the issue. The issue is I have nowhere to put it where I feel it's safe. I could slap it on another harddrive. But as we all know, harddrives are not reliable, especially for long-term backup. I could put the data on DVD, but it's over 60GB worth of data. That's a lot of DVDs. I could buy a Blu-Ray burner and get 25GB per disc, but that's still a lot of discs and I don't really have faith in the reliability of the media (nor in DVDs for that matter). I need to back-up the original files for Greg's solo disc (about 40GB), my solo disk (about 20GB), the last organissimo studio disc (about 35GB), the new organissimo live disc (about 15GB), and probably another 200GB of random shit. The local professional studio uses DLT, but the cheapest DLT drives are upwards of $600 and the tapes are about $40 a pop. Expensive, though that seems to be the only stable format. I guess I'm at a loss at what to do and I'm looking for suggestions. On another note, I have two Sony DVD burners, one in my office machine and one in the DAW. The one in the DAW stopped burning discs about 2 years ago or more (after only having it for about a year). Now the one in my office machine has stopped burning discs. I barely used the damn things. And yet the 10 year old Plextor CD-burner in my office machine still works flawlessly. I hate cheap shit. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Big Wheel Posted February 23, 2010 Report Share Posted February 23, 2010 a RAID array? Still hard drives, but at least you get some security with the redundancy. If your DVD burner supports dual-layer burning, you get 8.5 GB per disc, which isn't terrible. Cloud storage? There's still some risk and getting the data up there could take forever, but chances are your data won't be lost entirely if something goes horribly awry in the datacenter. I'd think most providers build in redundancy. All of the above? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neveronfriday Posted February 23, 2010 Report Share Posted February 23, 2010 (edited) My suggestion: a) Buy yourself an external case that can hold up to 4x2TB harddrives (WD eco series, or whatever, just drives that stay cool). b) That case can be connected to your PC via e-sata or USB. c) A case like that will set you back about $150 if you want a decent one. Put 4 discs of your choice in there. d) Use two drives for backup and mirror their contents to the other drives (takes time). In a case like that the discs basically become hot-swappable. One goes down the drain, buy a new one. I use one setup like this next to some external drives and it's the most comfortable. At average, one could say (if not unlucky) that one drive fails every two to three years. Just replace it with another one. That means initial cost is high (depending on case and number/size of discs you put in there), the rest you can forget about. Buying a new dirive every two or three years for around $90 or less ain't gonna kill you. P.S.: If on Windows, a case like that simply holds the drives that are either recognized as single drives (recommended!), but you can also set them up as one single drive (NOT recommended). I use mine through USB and just connect whenever I want to make backups. Friends of mine have theirs connected constantly (if you have the right case, it'll go to sleep with the rest of your PC). Summary: What you get is something like a NAS without all the bells and whistles that people usually don't need anyway. I'll look for some pics online and post them here. Give me a minute. Edited February 23, 2010 by neveronfriday Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neveronfriday Posted February 23, 2010 Report Share Posted February 23, 2010 (edited) That's the one I have (Amazon Germany link): Fantech . No idea what you can get in the States. I have 4 2TB drives in there, but you can put any combination of S-ATA discs in there (also of different sizes). But, keeping the backup mechanism in mind I described above, I would put 4 identically-sized drives in (I have a friend who keeps two (very) old and two new ones in there). No probs. Took me 7 minutes to set up. Screw the drives on a tray, push them in. Done. The thing has a fan that can be regulated by you or automatically by the case and - if you put the modern silent drives in - barely audible! If you only connect it when needed, ... best and most comfortable backup solution there is IMHO. P.S.: For an e-SATA connection (about 2.5 - 3 times faster than USB) you apparently need "Port-multiplying". No idea. I use USB. Edit: Of course, you can slo leave slots empty and put one or two drives in there for starters. Edited February 23, 2010 by neveronfriday Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
.:.impossible Posted February 23, 2010 Report Share Posted February 23, 2010 How do you feel about SSD? If I had the money, that's what I'd do for extremely important documents, along with a multi-bay hot-swappable NAS. Synology, QNAP, Thecus or DROBO. DROBO is the most expensive solution, but seems worth the difference. Access that backup drive at a bare minimum. Keep it boxed away. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kevin Bresnahan Posted February 23, 2010 Report Share Posted February 23, 2010 Back up to a hard drive and then shut it off and store it somewhere. Only pull it out if you need it. It should last a long time with no wear & tear. BTW, I would stay away from DVD media for long term storage. I have had several that stopped reading after a little over a year on the shelf. Scared the heck out of me. I'm glad I did not delete what I had burned onto these DVD-Rs. Kevin Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John L Posted February 23, 2010 Report Share Posted February 23, 2010 (edited) Back up to a hard drive and then shut it off and store it somewhere. Only pull it out if you need it. It should last a long time with no wear & tear. BTW, I would stay away from DVD media for long term storage. I have had several that stopped reading after a little over a year on the shelf. Scared the heck out of me. I'm glad I did not delete what I had burned onto these DVD-Rs. Kevin That is basically what I do, and I back up everthing twice. I accumulate stuff on my hard drive and one external drive for a little while. Then I transfer everthing new to two other external drives, and erase it from my hard drive. I actually haven't had an external drive fail on me yet, and I have been using them for 6 years or so (although upgrading to newer and larger ones). But I know that they will, and I am ready for it. Edited February 23, 2010 by John L Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dan Gould Posted February 23, 2010 Report Share Posted February 23, 2010 My first thought was to suggest you locate a really good reel-to-reel machine but I wasn't really sure whether to recommend 16 ips transfers or 48 ips. But maybe some of these other options won't take as long. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Garrett Posted February 24, 2010 Report Share Posted February 24, 2010 Same as Kevin and John... Composer/artist friends I know do this too and will store an extra drive of their work at a trusted friend's house in case of a catastrophe at their own home. This bears repeating. For data that you absolutely can't afford to lose, you need redundant backups with at least one set stored offsite. Some folks keep three sets of backups with two stored offsite in different locations. Hard drives can fail from lack of use as well as constant use (and there's plenty of debate as to which is worse for a drive), so make sure you spin up the offsite backups on a scheduled basis once in a while. If you're using USB external drives, you could rotate the offsite backup drives in and the onsite backup drives out every so often, assuming that the onsite backup drives would see semi-regular activity. Any archivist will tell you that a migration path for archived data is essential, especially in an era of rapid technological advancements where what was a standard storage format 5-10 years ago is most likely now obsolete. So plan on replacing the drives (or whatever storage media you decide on) and migrating the data every so often even if they still appear to be functioning perfectly. Don't think of your backups as something to just put on a shelf and forget about until you need them, but rather something that needs to be actively managed. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jim Alfredson Posted February 24, 2010 Author Report Share Posted February 24, 2010 Seems like the cash outlay of buying 4 2TB drives plus the enclosure could be used to buy a DLT tape drive (360gb per tape capacity). As I mentioned, that's what a local professional studio uses and he has great results. Just recently he loaded a project stored on a 10 year old tape and it came up flawlessly. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Garrett Posted February 25, 2010 Report Share Posted February 25, 2010 If you're considering DLT, do some research on LTO before making a decision. I'm no tape-format expert, but from what I've read LTO is the format of choice for many in the archival community, incorporating both backwards compatibility in addition to a well-defined path forward for format upgrades. The downside is that I believe LTO requires a significantly larger up-front hardware investment than DLT does, but again, I haven't actually priced drives. DLT, SDLT, LTO FAQ (lots more where this came from via a Google search for "DLT LTO") Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neveronfriday Posted February 25, 2010 Report Share Posted February 25, 2010 (edited) Seems like the cash outlay of buying 4 2TB drives plus the enclosure could be used to buy a DLT tape drive (360gb per tape capacity). As I mentioned, that's what a local professional studio uses and he has great results. Just recently he loaded a project stored on a 10 year old tape and it came up flawlessly. Only if you have 4 TB of data to store and mirror. Do you? If not, the solution I suggested is still the cheapest (if you don't mind the work involved). Financing another solution NAS/whatever was just out of the question for me because I have a mass of data to store (it's almost embarrassing, but I'm approaching 20TB fast (that's including mirrored data)). Edited February 25, 2010 by neveronfriday Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jim Alfredson Posted February 25, 2010 Author Report Share Posted February 25, 2010 No, I don't have more than 4TB of data, but it probably won't be long before I do, especially as I keep recording albums and such. The thing I like about DLT is having one tape per project rather than everything bunched together on one massive drive (well, a RAID array of drives). I could also provide a tape to the artist for his/her own storage as well. The point is moot right now as I don't even have enough money at the moment to buy a harddrive that I can restore my lost partition to. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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