Best Way to Archive

Donald Hancock · November 14, 2008

I'm curious to find out what's the best way to archive my footage. I have my original tapes as well the imported footage, but am thinking of moving the files to another hard drive. Would it be easier to print back to tape and store that way? Any thoughts and/or help is appreciated.

Adrian Sierkowski · November 14, 2008

I hear the LTO tape drives are the best way for datacentric archival.

Paul Bruening · November 14, 2008

The cheapest and most practical way is redundancy and migration. Repeat the data on multiple hard drives and migrate it to fresh drives as the processing and storage technologies change. Keep a certain number of prior drives as well. Store the drive sets in different locations.

Daniel Smith · November 14, 2008

Western digital do 1TB external USB hard drives for about £90.

I'd say DLT tape but that involves getting the drive etc. which can be costly. It really depends on how much you're storing to make it worth it.

I like the 1TB hard drive as its cheap, holds a lot, and you can access it when you want. Get 3 and stick them on a hub.

LTO is nice just bloody expensive.

Edited November 14, 2008 by Daniel Ashley-Smith

Kevin Zanit · November 14, 2008

We use LTO4 for archiving. LTO is by far one of the best ways to backup material. With LTO4 you can fit up 1.6TB (compressed) on the tape, but it depends on what you are putting on to tape how well it will compress. You will be able to put at least 800gb on each LTO4 tape.

How much material (in GB) do you need to backup? PM me, may be able to help you.

Kevin

Donald Hancock · November 14, 2008

I'm thinking I'll need at least a TB for storage. I like Daniel's ideas about buying an external hard drive and sticking them on a hub. That will probably be the cheapest method. I'll definitely look into the LTO4 and see if that can be an option for another project. Thanks for the help.

Donald

Chris Burke · November 16, 2008

I'm thinking I'll need at least a TB for storage. I like Daniel's ideas about buying an external hard drive and sticking them on a hub. That will probably be the cheapest method. I'll definitely look into the LTO4 and see if that can be an option for another project. Thanks for the help.

Donald

It may be the cheapest but it may also be the least reliable. If a hard drive sits static for a while on a shelf, then is restarted months or years later, errors and critical data loss can occur. Is your creative magic and caring that you spent on your project worth a cheap back up solution? Also, on an environmental note, having to consistently back up to the latest hard drive type uses energy. Having to maintain those storage mediums over time uses energy, or should I say, it uses more than a reliable long term solution. Certainly, separation masters are the best archival medium known, but also expensive. Look around for an appropriate solution, but avoid the long term hard drive method like the plague.

Daniel Smith · November 16, 2008

Hard drives are less reliable but I don't think they are anywhere near as bad as people make them out to be. I think it really depends on how important the video is to you, I keep all my video on my hard drive but it's not commercial work so it would only be a shame if I lost it. If it's commercial it needs to be on something reliable.

I'm not sure if these will deal with non-business customers but they are offering a cheap LTO drive:

http://www.idealkit.co.uk/collections/mass...-200gb-internal

Failing that there are DAT drives, holding a similar amount to the low end LTO drives just a hell of a lot cheaper. I don't know how reliable DAT tape is, perhaps someone else here can fill that one in.

But as I say, it really depends how large and important the work is. If it will fit, DVD discs are reliable provided they are looked after. Same with blu-ray.

Edited November 16, 2008 by Daniel Ashley-Smith

Kevin Zanit · November 16, 2008

Hard drives are not super prone to failure, but it certainly happens regularly. Also, remember, when dealing with large size video files, etc. you tend to utilize a stripped RAID array consisting of at least fours drives normally; thus a failure rate that is 4 times higher. Of course there are protected RAID modes that diminish the likelihood of total data loss, but as drives get bigger the current RAID modes that are common become far more likely to have unrecoverable data.

Older LTO and DAT tapes are fine, its just their capacity is pretty low/ they are really slow. For instance, the LTO1 drive you linked only holds 100gb native and writes at 7.5Mbps. LTO4 for example, has an 800gb native capacity and writes at 120MB/s.

Kevin Zanit