OT- Interesting storage solutions

vicmilt wrote on 6/8/2007, 2:15 PM
I am currently working with six terrabytes of media and wondering what and how to backup - so I don't have to kill myself in the event of a crash.

It would be prohibitively expensive to back up and maintain all 6 terrabytes of meda, and theoretically I can redigitize in the event of a drive crash. So I'm just backing up VEG files and selected pre-renders.

I've created Vegas "Assemblies" of each roll of video.
I'm backing those assembly VEG files up.

Then I've now transferred all of my various "chapter" edits onto one 1 (Master Edit) one terrabyte raid (0) drive which reference the various outboard SATA drives (12 media 500's on SATA docks). I hot swap in the media I need when I need it.

These Chapter VEG files get backed up every night to a 5th 500 gig backup-only drive.
And I'm sort of selectively backing up certain complex pre-renders.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Meanwhile, here's a neat setup - but I don't know anything more about it than is written here.

http://postproduction.digitalmedianet.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=148128

Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 6/8/2007, 2:32 PM
Vic,

I get daily storage email alerts from this site:

Dealnews

I linked you directly to their storage area. If you do a quick scan, you'll see that you can get 500GB drives for about $100, shipped. Thus, by my math, you could get 12 of these and you'd have your 6 terabytes for a grand total of $1,200. You wouldn't even need to get enclosures; just plug them into an enclosure temporarily (or use one of those $12 external IDE/SATA cables -- I have one and it works great; no enclosure needed). Then put it on the shelf, or vault, or whatever. No need to get anything other than cheap drives. Performance doesn't matter, and given the light duty they'll be seeing, they will be more than reliable enough for what you want to do.

Longer term, if we ever get blue laser recorders at cheap prices, then you should be able to get 50 Gbytes on a disc. It will take 120 of these to do the backup, but if you plan to invest in an automated burner, you'll be able to just load up with a stack of discs and let it burn. With DVDs at $0.40/disc in quantities (for good discs), if HD discs eventually come down to that price (which I guess Blu-ray may not because of license fees, but perhaps HD-DVD will), this whole backup would cost about $50.

But that is 2-3 years away.

You wanted thoughts: them's mine.
farss wrote on 6/8/2007, 3:14 PM
LTO tape seems to be the current practice solution. Moderately high initial investment but cost per byte from then on is fairly low. Advantage is multiple backups can be cheaply made for storage in separate location.
1 Thecus 5200 can now hold 4TBs of disk in RAID 5 and the empty box is around USD 600 although cost per byte would be cheaper and possibly more reliable with 500GB disks. This solution gives you on line backup but it's going to be in the same physical location as what you're backing up.

I think firstly you need to workout what the assets are worth, are the masters yours, how are they backed up, is this material of any value to anyone other than yourself. I'm only guessing but anything that involves 9TBs of data is probably more valuable than last weekends kiddies football so proper risk analysis would seem in order.

Bob.
Serena wrote on 6/9/2007, 2:00 AM
Vic,
You need a lot of storage while doing post production on "cowboys", but maybe not so much for the next few projects. Would it be economical to hire the storage; commonly done for feature editing,